No Capitulation on Abortion Rights!

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Music for this episode: Penny the Snitch by Ikebe Shakedown.

Episode 89

SPEAKERS

Amy Littlefield, Michigan activists, Brett Kavanaugh, Jessica Prozinski, Amy Coney Barrett, Sunsara Taylor, Sam Goldman

Jessica Prozinski 00:00

We support the right to abortion unconditionally… Outlawing abortion doesn’t stop abortions — it just makes them more dangerous… The state should not be telling us who we can have sex with, who we can marry, if and when to have a baby… We the people of Michigan open our arms to our siblings in Mississippi and Texas and around the world, and we’ll fight for your rights from the cradle to the grave.

Sam Goldman

Welcome to Episode 89 of the Refuse Fascism podcast. This podcast is brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of this show. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes, and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in this country. 

In today’s episode we’re sharing commentary from Sunsara Taylor on the moves to overturn Roe v Wade along with a conversation I had with an Ann Arbor based activist who traveled to the Michigan State Capitol on Dec 1st to shut down the State Legislature to sound the alarm on the emergency for abortion rights. 

But first, y’all, it has been a week! Let’s talk about some developments from this week as they relate to the continued fascist threat. 

Let’s start with the “options for January 6” PowerPoint uncovered by the January 6 commission – the one that was found in the possession of Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, who is now refusing to cooperate any further with the investigation. The source of this file said that he didn’t directly provide it to Meadows, which pretty clearly implies that it was circulating within the executive branch. A number of senators were reportedly briefed with this same PowerPoint prior to the coup. As Hugh Lowell pointed out in regards to the PowerPoint Meadows handed over, “But recall that was what he chose to give the Jan. 6 committee — raising possibility that what he withheld may be worse.”

To be clear, it’s already patently obvious that as David Frum tweeted, “Hi, it’s December 2021 and it’s now literally in writing that senior advisers to the ex-president of the United States plotted to declare a bogus national emergency to cancel a national election and seize the government by military force,” the guy who tried to overthrow the last presidential election, first by deceit, then by violence, is the far-and-away front-runner for his party’s nomination in the next presidential election. The American political situation is frightening and upsetting if presented in simple, clear words which may explain why so much political talk these days is so unsimple and unclear.” Here is one more piece of hard evidence that what we know now is what we knew then, and what has been clear every day since. 

In related news, as first reported on by Politico, Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis wrote two legal memos in the week before the January 6 fascist coup attempt that claimed then-Vice President Mike Pence had the authority to refuse to count presidential electors from states that delivered Joe Biden the White House.

And sorry, y’all, I just have to play this segment of Trump from the Laura Ingraham’s show on FOX this Friday:

Donald Trump

It was a protest. The insurrection took place on November 3 2020, which was election day. This was a protest and a lot of innocent people are being hurt.  A lot of innocent people are being injured. I would say the panel of judges that we’re talking about didn’t exactly like Trump and if you look at the appointments, you can figure that one out for yourself.  But this was a absolute protest and people are being treated very, very unfairly. Their rights are being taken away from them. And the other side is not. You take a look at what’s going on with BLM and ANTIFA, and what they did in Portland and Minneapolis and Seattle, and nothing happens. But what ha… and by the way, people were killed. Nobody was killed here other than Ashli Babbit, who was shot violently by a man who should not have ever been allowed to pull that trigger.”

Sam Goldman

A protest? Nobody died? We all witnessed as the crowd of hundreds of thugs, theocrats, and fanatical yahoos, armed with schematics and tactical gear, prepared to take hostages and much worse, stormed the capitol waving Confederate flags, leaving four dead bodies and hundreds injured in their wake, a noose and gallows, active pipe bombs littering the Capitol grounds, shit smeared on the walls, staff and congresspeople barricaded and hidden fearing for their lives, all in the interest of maintaining Trump’s fascist hold on power. Every single piece of evidence that has come out since then has not only backed up the horror of what we saw, but shown that it was more brutal, more organized, and more coordinated from the top. And listen to this:

Donald Trump

I have nothing to hide. I wasn’t involved in that. And if you look at my words, and what I said in the speech, they were extremely calming, actually. But, uhh, I would think that the Democrats would like to see it, and I think secretly, they would like to see it upheld.”

Sam Goldman

For a refresher of his January 6 remarks since it’s been almost a year, let’s listen to those calming words:

Donald Trump

All of us here today, do not want to see our election victory stolen by the emboldened radical left Democrats, which is what they’re doing. And stolen by the fake news media, that’s what they’ve done and what they’re doing. We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore, and that’s what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal… We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing, and only count the electors that have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard. Today we will see whether Republicans stand strong for integrity of our elections, but whether or not they stand strong for our country, our country. Our country has been under siege for a long time…

Sam Goldman

If you haven’t yet read Barton Gellman’s substantive article titled, “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun,” published by The Atlantic, I recommend you do it now. It’s important that people read and discuss this article, most importantly for the implications it poses. There is much that stood out to me but here is one quote that I think sums it up: “Donald Trump came closer than anyone thought he could to toppling a free election a year ago. He is preparing in plain view to do it again, and his position is growing stronger. Republican acolytes have identified the weak points in our electoral apparatus and are methodically exploiting them. They have set loose and now are driven by the animus of tens of millions of aggrieved Trump supporters who are prone to conspiracy thinking, embrace violence, and reject democratic defeat.”

His article further exposes how January 6 was just practice. He argues that the threat of American democracy as we know it coming to an end in 2024 is a real and present danger. The attempt by Trump and other Republicans to overturn the results of the 2020 election failed. But Gellman reports that Republicans have been building an apparatus for election theft. They’ve analyzed Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 results. They’ve evaluated missteps and have taken measures to avoid failure next time by working to change whose votes are counted, who oversees the election, who chooses the electors, and what happens in the courts. He writes: “Trump has built the first American mass political movement that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed, for its cause.”

Well, if you are a regular listener to the Refuse Fascism podcast this should all sound very familiar to what we have been making the case for prior to the 2020 election!! Gellman, however, tilts our eyes to the midterms, to the need for Biden to change course and be “a strong and clear eyed” leader who marshals his power and resources to face this challenge. But let’s get real. The Democrats are committed to “playing by the rules” and “relying on the norms,” while the Republi-fascists are moving to tear up those norms and rule through open terror and violence. We can’t squander the small window we have by begging Democrats to change. We need to marshal OUR power and our resources into the streets to meet this challenge, independent of the will or interests of the Democratic Party. Nobody else is going to do it. We need you with us. If you appreciate what we do on this show each week we hope you’ll head over to RefuseFascism.org after you finish listening and hit that DONATE button. As an independent podcast we rely solely on your support. 

Okay, back to the roundup. As I mentioned, we have been talking about Trump’s coup since well, way before it happened. We saw what Trump was doing in the months leading up to the election – undermining the process, saying if he doesn’t win it must be rigged, and as of late August 2020, we already began calling it what it was – a rolling coup. We issued a pledge to the people of the world which appeared in the New York Times November 9 [2020] with prominent signers reading, in part: We pledge to stay in the streets, overcoming fear and uncertainty, until this American fascism is brought to a halt. We pledge our determination to prevail over a regime that imperils the people of the world and the Earth itself. We saw what Trump was doing in the months leading up to the election, undermining the process, saying if he doesn’t win, it must be rigged, and as of late August 2020, already began calling it what it was: a rolling coup. We organized daily protests starting in October.

Our podcast had numerous episodes devoted to this, and Refuse Fascism led numerous actions to counter this in the lead-up to election night, in the days that followed before the results were in, and then as the fascists began their increasingly violent actions in DC (January 6 being the third such action.) Taking a step back, we saw this coming when we started this organization back in late 2016 – correctly identifying Trump and Pence as fascists and actually meaning it and understanding its implications, not because we didn’t like them, but because we seriously looked at what was going on in the world. We knew that it was going to take a determined, organized, mass sustained non-violent protest movement to drive out the fascists and the fascism that was on the rise.

This isn’t an “I told you so” moment but a “how did we get here” moment. Not only did we say this, but we acted on this and called on people to act on this basis. We called on people to take actions large and small, to prepare for major nodal points, to confront the fascists where it counted.  The leaders of Refuse Fascism put their bodies on the front lines repeatedly and were not only met with silence from those purportedly on our side, but often derision – all of which is an essential ingredient in how we got to where we are today. Now that we’re here, with “serious” people saying some of what we’ve been saying for over a year, it might be worth listening to us about what it will take to knock the fascists off course, change the course of this country, as well as listen to the voices we’re highlighting, paving the way to action and preparation for the action that is required of us. And we need these “serious” people who are starting to write about this ongoing coup to talk seriously to all their listeners about the need to act independently, the need to stop investing all our hopes and dreams and energy into collaborators and exercise our power in the streets.

Instead of being in jail, Steve Bannon hosted Matt Gaetz on his podcast this past Thursday. Gaetz said, “an army of patriots” should get ready now to “fight” for the US. Bannon said, “shock troops” divided into teams could take over some 4,000 government positions. This is three things: a threat, a strategy, and also an exposure of what happened the first time around. Because, while Obama was telling us to give Trump a chance back in 2017, these fascists began a total overhaul of the people who make up the federal government, emptying offices, freezing hiring, and experimenting in every way they could to replace career civil servants with fascist ideologues. With the long-term damage they caused and with that experience behind them, what they could do sweeping back into office could be much worse.

Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works, was on Mehdi Hassan’s show this past week. He said, “If you want to topple a democracy, you take over the courts. It’s the first thing you do. We have a court takeover…the results of the court takeover we’ve been seeing for many years. We see in real time why the courts are so important. You target democracy, you take over the courts and the schools. What are we going to do about a Supreme Court that has been stacked with conservatives, despite the fact that Trump lost the popular vote by three million in 2016?” This is part of why we are spending so many episodes on what’s going on with the Supreme Court. 

Speaking of so-called democracy, Biden’s Democracy Summit struck many mainstream commentators in its hypocrisy. As Debasish Roy Chowdhury wrote in Time Magazine, “Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte and Jair Bolsonaro walk into a democracy summit. But this isn’t a joke.” This has similarities and differences from his collaboration and conciliation to fascism here “at home.” The difference is that here Biden is attempting to “recover” the United States’ so-called moral authority in the world, to frame the US as the friendly imperialist superpower in opposition to China and Russia. This is a stark contrast from the transnational and fickle foreign policy of the American fascists united under Trump, and this is one of the real contentions between these two sections of the ruling class. But it is also similar to his collaboration with fascists at home, in that his vision of “democracy” is most fundamentally about maintaining power, order and broad unity among the ruling classes (of course with the US on top), not justice. And Biden will partner with the likes of Modi and Bolsonaro and Duterte and ultimately Trump, even if the order they provide is fascism. 

We are going to make a sharp turn into abortion land.  On Friday, the Supreme Court of the United States issued their ruling regarding SB8, Texas’ abortion ban. They ruled that the Texas abortion clinic can sue over the state ban, but they will not stop the law from being enforced in the meantime. This is nothing less than the erasure of Roe in the State of Texas and the several states lined up with copycat laws. Lauren Rankin author of a forthcoming book, Bodies on The Line, put it well when she stated: “This is not a ‘partial victory for abortion providers.’ This is SCOTUS UPHOLDING A SIX WEEK ABORTION BAN, before many know they’re pregnant, and forcing abortion providers to fight vigilantes with resources they don’t have. They are telling you they’re overturning Roe v. Wade. A six-week ban is blatantly and intentionally unconstitutional. By allowing that to remain in effect and effectively banning abortion in Texas, the Supreme Court is telling us they’re going to overturn Roe. They have power and don’t care about legitimacy. Do you believe us now?”

Many are applauding Gavin Newsome’s test of SCOTUS legitimacy by his declaration, “If states can shield their laws from review by federal courts, then California will use that authority to help protect lives. We will work to create the ability for private citizens to sue anyone who manufactures, distributes, or sells an assault weapon or ghost gun kit or parts in CA.” But here is the thing: this pro-fascist majority SCOTUS is not bound by its own logic. It is not burdened by hypocrisy. We need to look at where the commonality here is? The world that those on the Supreme Court, this pro-fascist majority, the world that they are fighting for,  where that commonality is, and it’s for cruel brutality, for white supremacy, for unrestrained American chauvinism, and vicious patriarchy.   

Justice Sotomayor in her dissent wrote, “My disagreement with the Court runs far deeper than a quibble over how many defendants these petitioners may sue. The dispute is over whether States may nullify federal constitutional rights by employing schemes like the one at hand.”

She’s right. The question is: Are we going to just stan her while the world burns down, or are we – in our millions – gonna rise up, get loud, and try to stop this?

It’s time to stop waiting to see how the normal channels are going to play out. A Supreme Court stacked with Christian fascists is showing you their hand on SB8 and Roe v. Wade. By the time you’re done waiting and seeing, it will be too late to stop it. Now is the time to act.

Now here is Sunsara Taylor.

Sunsara Taylor 18:14

On December 1, the fascist judges who now dominate the Supreme Court showed their fangs. They made clear that they may well be willing to shred the constitutional right to abortion that was established nearly 50 years ago in Roe vs. Wade. This would be a leap in the enslavement of women. That is what it is to be forced to have children against your will. At the same time, this would be a leap in the rapidly advancing attempt to remake all of society in a fascist way, characterized by open hatred of women, open white supremacy, raw America First chauvinism and violence, all enforced by a state that has abandoned even the pretense of the rights of the people, backed up by fascist mobs. A decision in this case is not expected until June of 2022. And the time between now and then needs to be filled with massive struggle, refusing to let this attack go down. To get just a sense of the stakes, just listen to some of what these fascist judges had to say. Here’s Brett Kavanaugh

Brett Kavanaugh 19:18

You say that the existing framework accommodates, that’s your word, both the interest of the pregnant woman and the interest of the fetus. And the problem, I think the other side would say, and the reason this issue is hard is that you can’t accommodate both interests. You have to pick. That’s the fundamental problem. And one interest has to prevail over the other at any given point in time. And that’s why this is so challenging, I think.

Sunsara Taylor 19:52

No, there are not two interests to weigh. Fetuses are not people. They have no interest, period. But really this talk of fetal interest is just a cover. It’s a distraction from the real issue: the enslavement of women. There is no world in which abortion is restricted that doesn’t do grotesque physical, emotional, social and psychic violence to women by turning them into incubators, baby-making machines, hijacking their bodies, their safety, their lives, their social standing, their lifelong relations and more. And here’s Justice Amy Coney Barrett during the hearing, suggesting that being denied an abortion doesn’t matter that much because there are safe haven laws that allow a woman to just drop the newborn off at a police station.

Amy Coney Barrett 20:43

Both Roe and Casey emphasize the burdens of parenting. And insofar as you and many of your amici focus on the ways in which the forced parenting forced motherhood would hinder women’s access to the workplace and to equal opportunities, it’s also focused on the consequences of parenting and the obligations of motherhood that flow from pregnancy. Why don’t the safe haven laws take care of that problem?

Sunsara Taylor 21:08

Seriously? Beyond the fact that pregnancy involves an actual physical danger to the health of a woman, in Mississippi, for example, it is 75 times more dangerous to give birth than to have an abortion. Beyond even this, being forced to create and then give up a child is emotional torture, torture that doesn’t end after the baby is dropped off. And add to this the weight of thousands of years of patriarchal social judgment and stigma that is heaped on women who are deemed bad mothers.

Let’s be clear, just as the widespread lynchings of Black people did not only affect their direct victims but had a terrorizing effect on the entire Black population, this kind of barbaric cruelty would not only affect the individual women forced to have children and then give them away. This scenario, which is just one of many horrific scenarios that would become common without safe legal abortion, would hang like a weight and a terror over the lives of all women and all girls. This assault on women’s lives needs to be massively resisted. The fury of women needs to be called forth powerfully and advances must be wrenched, and lifting people’s sights to, and organizing them for the revolution that is needed to bury in history forever this system that would enslave women in this way.

This is what Bob Avakian and the Revcoms he is leading are fighting for. And you need to join us in this. At this very dangerous hour, the so-called women’s movement is capitulating to this assault. They are accepting that abortion protections will be lost nationally, and then trying to protect them in a few states. They are continuing what has been a decade’s long pattern of fighting defensively, on ever shrinking ground as this assault grows worse and worse. Some are even promoting feel good fairy tales, that all this really isn’t that bad and we have a lot to celebrate anyhow. Listen to what Amy Littlefield, a pro-choice writer had to say on Democracy Now last week. Note that she makes a big deal of the fact that her views are informed by and reflect her conversations with at least 50 abortion rights activists.

Amy Littlefield 23:32

I think the most important thing that I saw was not what was going on inside the Supreme Court, which was sort of confirmation that they’re going to do what, you know, the Christian right has been planning for decades. But what I saw outside was an abortion rights movement that was really emboldened, that was prepared, that was debuting the messaging that is going to be needed to rebuild a mass movement to change the culture and to reshape the fight in the years to come after the right to legal abortion falls.

Sunsara Taylor 24:08

While it’s posed mostly as an afterthought in her comments, it should not be missed that Littlefield is explicitly accepting as inevitable that abortion rights will fall. This is unconscionable. And what exactly did Littlefield see outside the court that gave her such confidence? She spoke about how some activists chanted “abortion pills forever,” speaking of the medication that can safely induce abortions in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. [Women chanting “Abortion pills are in our hands and we won’t stop!”] Littlefield explained:

Amy Littlefield 24:47

As organizer Amelia Bondo told me, Republicans might have the courts, but we’re out here having abortions, right? They can’t stop them. That was the point. They’re in open defiance of the court. They’re saying, you can ban abortion legally but now that these pills are out there, you can’t actually stop people from having abortions.

Sunsara Taylor 25:10

Stop playing! Of course it matters that the state criminalizes abortion, and all the more so if it unleashes mobs of Christian fascist and other fanatics to hunt down women and those who help them the way Texas has. Just look at El Salvador, where abortion is so criminalized that not only are women sent to prison, but doctors are legally required to report miscarriages to the police or else risk prison themselves. Or look at Indiana where in 2015, Pervi Patel was sentenced to prison for allegedly inducing her own abortion.

The point in this is not that the state is all powerful or that there is no way to go forward, precisely the opposite. But we have to confront this honestly, and we have to struggle. The fury of women and those who refuse to see women slammed backwards needs to be called forward and unleashed. It needs to shake all of society, like we saw in Poland and Argentina and Mexico. All of this needs to be linked to and increasingly impacted by growing numbers of clear-eyed revolutionaries, who rooting themselves in the new communism and the leadership being provided by Bob Avakian, are determined to bring this whole illegitimate system down and bring a better world into being.

Sam Goldman 26:31

That was Sunsara Taylor. Her commentary originally aired on an episode of the Revolution Nothing Less show. You can catch her full commentary by clicking the link in the Show Notes, and watch the whole episode it was part of. I wanted to add a few things that I was thinking while listening to her segment. First, another thought or two regarding the notion that abortion pills forever as some kind of radical loophole in the Mississippi ban. I think it’s ridiculous because it is five weeks stricter than the 15 week ban Mississippi is fighting for. Remember, the abortion pill is usable only pretty early in pregnancy. Also, it’s worth looking at Poland, where a year after their near total ban on abortion, they now have proposed a centralized registry of pregnancies that would obligate doctors to report all pregnancies and miscarriages to the government. If this passes, it will go into effect next month. This is the direction we’re headed in. They are dead-set on making sure that all pregnancies end with birth or punishment. It’s time that we stop thinking that it can’t or won’t happen here unless we stop it.

As Sunsara was talking about Pervi Patel, I was thinking about Britney Poolaw from Oklahoma, where at age 20, pregnant seven weeks before viability, she had a miscarriage, and this past October she was convicted of manslaughter for this miscarriage and sentenced to four years in prison. You can read Sunsara’s recent article “Earth to Delusional Movement Activists, Abortion Pills and Identity Politics Are No Match for a Fascist State” at refusefascism.org. And you can catch her each week on the Revolution, Nothing Less show on Thursdays at 8:00 pm Eastern time on YouTube. Follow her on Twitter @SunsaraTaylor. Next, you’ll hear from Jessica Pilsudski, who was one of the Michigan activists that shut down legislature to read a statement in support of abortion rights. I just have to say that while the silence of those in support of abortion rights has been deafening, there have been a courageous few that are sounding the alarm, challenging and marshalling people to not capitulate on this most essential, right, but instead act now to save the right to abortion. Last week, you heard from an activist who traveled to DC to protest outside the Supreme Court. And today, I’m excited to chat with Jessica Prozinski who shut down the Michigan legislature the day of the Dobbs hearing to sound the alarm on the abortion rights emergency. So welcome, Jessica.

Jessica Prozinski 29:13

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Sam Goldman 29:15

Let’s start with what you all did, because it was it was pretty bold. You’re an activist from Ann Arbor. And you traveled to your state capitol to protest for this essential right. You did it, I believe, on the same day as the Dobbs hearing, correct?

Jessica Prozinski 29:35

Yes, we did. We wanted to do it to draw attention to the Dobbs hearing and we also had a Michigan focus. One of our demands was for Michigan to repeal Act 328, which is a 1931 law that outlaws abortion in Michigan that makes it a felony to give people either a drug that would cause abortion or use an instrument to cause abortion.

Sam Goldman 29:58

Yeah, it’s a really outrageous thing that it still exists. When you guys went to Lansing, Michigan, you were in the viewing gallery, and chanted Repeal Act 328. And you guys are gonna listen to that now.

Michigan activists 30:15

[indistinct]…empower those demanding drafting radical change to prevent devastating, species threatening climate change. We are here as delegates from the street… ideas are powerful and are contagious. Today, we are up here and you are down there. Your power is in a backroom, our power is in the streets. We are not impressed. We are here to fight for real democracy. You will see us again… Repeal Act 328! [repeating and escalating]

Jessica Prozinski 31:15

It went really, really well. It exceeded our expectations. We started with doing speeches and a speak out in the rotunda, which is just like the center public area of the state capitol. We did that for about an hour, and then phase two of our plan was to go into the legislature. We went into the House of Representatives to read that declaration. Our original plan was we expected to be kicked out. We had a list of people who were going to read the statement out loud, so I was going to go first. Then when the Capitol Police pulled me out, then Rosa was going to read the statement. Then when she was ejected, then Becca was mentioned. We had a whole list. They sort of outmaneuvered us. They did not eject us. Instead, they kept proceeding with their business and tried to ignore us. Since they had the microphones, I was drowned out. We only had about three dozen people.

At this point, we only had about 10 people on each side of the gallery who were able to stay. So we’re kind of looking at each other trying to figure out what to do. It was really cool. It was sort of like a flash of group inspiration. We kind of elbowed each other and we’re like, Okay, everybody read. When we all read the statement in unison, it was very loud. It’s a very big, echoing room, and they could not proceed. They had to stop and hear us out. It was a long statement, too. It was a page and a half or two pages long. So we just kind of hit a rhythm, and were chanting our statement, and some of the reps were recording on their phones, and they definitely heard us. The other thing I really liked is that we chanted andleft on our own terms. We got out of there. Someone in our group tried to do a banner drop, and for some reason it really provoked the Capitol Police. One of our members did get manhandled, pulled by the collar, by the throat and kind of like physically ejected from the legislature. So, I’m proud of our fighting spirit. I think we did everything we could.

Sam Goldman 33:06

I thought it was beautiful. It was bold, and I wanted to ask you a little bit more about that statement that you were reading. How did it come about? Was there a section that stood out to you the most, that was oh, this is what we need to be saying right now?

Jessica Prozinski 33:20

Yeah, that’s a good question. So, the people who organized this, it’s a new grouping of people. I think all of us have been around for a while as activists with different groups. But because the issue of abortion and reproductive rights has come to a head so recently and so strongly, it’s like a new group of people that we got together. We have people from Detroit Will Breathe, which is the Black Lives Matter movement in Detroit, the Wayne State University College Democrats who are actually quite radical, other groups like the Sisterhood Collective, and just different groups around the state, including Mid-Michigan March for Reproductive Rights. It was interesting. It was like a real hodgepodge of people, but that’s exactly what we needed to build a leadership of a movement in Michigan.

We had planning calls where we hashed out what we wanted to say, what our program was, what message we wanted to give. One thing that we were very intentional about in our planning calls and in our statement, was we wanted to make sure people knew that we were working to build an independent movement, that was not an auxiliary of the Democratic Party. We weren’t there because someone in the legislature was like, hey, come and speak out in support of this bill that I’m passing. So, we wanted to be very clear about that, and I think we succeeded in doing that. There was one moment — I really liked this moment. It was a little bit sharp-edged, but there was a representative, Brixie, who happened to come across us in the rotunda when we were doing our speak-out, and we were displaying a banner, which is against the rules apparently, and she was like, Oh, I’m gonna get a photo op. So she jumped behind our banner. Our two members who were holding the banner, just slowly lifted the banner up. Her face was not visible. It was kind of rude on her part to just jump in. It was kind of rude on our part to do that to someone, but I really liked that because it shocked her. And it made it very clear like we’re not here for you, we’re doing our own thing.

Sam Goldman 35:16

Why was that so important to you?

Jessica Prozinski 35:18

It was a really good instinct, because the default is that you follow the lead of the Democrats, that there’s no other option for getting things done. We are in the minority in believing that our power is in the streets. Our template is the Black Lives Matter uprising in the summer of 2020. That’s how you get stuff done. And no, we can’t call a mass movement into being. There’s something in that chemistry that’s beyond the will of any individual or any organization. Nevertheless, that is where our power is and that’s the only wait for us to achieve our demands. My philosophy on it is we can’t force that to happen, but it’s going to happen eventually. What we can do now is prepare ourselves to be able to successfully lead it when it does happen. That’s what we were trying to do with our three dozen people in Lansing on December 1st.

Sam Goldman 36:12

I think that your message of where our power lies is so, so important, and it’s being made really clear to anyone willing to pay attention in regards to abortion rights. People have for so long held so many illusions; the courts are going to save us, the courts are going to save us. The court is not going to f’ing save us. I think that paired with that, there’s been the constant pull on very good people to subordinate the interests of humanity — the interests of people that can become pregnant — to the Democratic Party and what’s best for them. Where that’s led people was for decades to not even say the word abortion; to allow it to be cloaked with shame and stigma. And now where it’s headed is that people are capitulating in advance. Before Roe is even dead, people are declaring it gone, instead of marshaling, as you were, the biggest fire alarm, the biggest bell that you can sound with whatever it is to be like, wake up, pay attention, it’s on us, we need to act. Those are just some of my uncollected thoughts on the matter. But I wanted to kind of go back to what y’all were saying on December 1 and tell us what your key message was. It was a repeal of the 1931 law.

Jessica Prozinski 37:38

That’s right. Yeah, repeal Act 328.

Sam Goldman 37:43

I think people really do need to seize models of what to do. There’s getting inspiration, not just all about tactics, but what difference it makes when people go and break the silence and do something out of the mold. Part of doing that is understanding the why behind people’s actions.

Jessica Pozinski 38:01

Yeah, that’s really true. There’s a difference between you gotta have the right program and be fighting for the right things, and then strategy and tactics are a little bit of a separate question. So our statement, we said, we support the right to abortion unconditionally. We wanted to make sure that we were not being in the slightest bit apologetic. Some of our speakers in the rotunda told just absolutely heartbreaking personal stories where they tried to break through that stigma of shame, and that it’s, you know, a personal problem that you had, it’s a social problem. We said in our statement, access to free and safe abortion is an essential human right.

Sam Goldman 38:37

I’m clapping.

Jessica Prozinski 38:40

We pointed out in our statement to the legislature when we were all chanting together, outlawing abortion doesn’t stop abortions, it just makes them more dangerous, and we demand the chance to live a decent life. I really thought it was important in our statement to generalize, because this is not just about abortion, obviously, one step removed from that it’s about building a movement for women’s and trans people’s rights that combat sexist stereotypes. Then obviously broader than that is about building a world that is good for all. But in our statement, we addressed the kind of gender stereotypes. We said we want to bury the social prejudices that make being a woman or transgender mean that you’re less than, you’re less safe, make less money, have fewer rights. You’re subjected to stereotypes that distort our personalities and prospects and that stunt our confidence. We reject state control of our bodies. The state should not be telling us who we can have sex with, who we can marry, if and when to have a baby. And we said if we choose to have a baby, we demand the right to raise those babies in a world that’s worthy of them. I felt really strongly about that part. And then we kind of like stuck a dagger in and we said political concerns, fundraising concerns, religious beliefs should have no place in these decisions. We said we’re here because we care fiercely for all people. We the people of Michigan, open our arms to our siblings in Mississippi and Texas and around the world and will fight for your rights from the cradle to the grave.

Sam Goldman 40:05

It’s really beautiful. Again, I just want to underscore people to take to heart this content of what they’re saying. There’s no reason why actions like this should not be replicated across the country. We need to break through the silence and be changing the trajectory really quickly. I want to get your thoughts on what happened in DC in the the Dobbs hearings, if you had any thoughts that you wanted to share about oral arguments or about the larger crisis that we face? I’d like to hear your thoughts on that.

Jessica Prozinski 40:41

I am glad that Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, “Will this court survive the stench of overturning Roe versus Wade,” because I think that is their one motivation. To not do this in fear of their own perceived legitimacy. One thing that I’m focused on — I do think they’re going to either overturn Roe v Wade outright, or they’re going to uphold the Mississippi law, which erodes Roe v Wade so dramatically — I want to fight like hell between now and when the decision comes out, but I think, realistically, that’s what we’re looking at. If they do that, I want them to not be able to survive the stench. I want it to be like such a black mark that people unequivocally see the Supreme Court as partisan political hacks that don’t have any legitimacy. That’s the silver lining that I will try, like how to get out of this if they do this thing.

Sam Goldman 41:36

Yeah. I think after Friday, where the Supreme Court upheld SB8, Texas’s abortion ban — which is more dramatic in many ways than Mississippi’s in that it’s a six- week ban, it allows the deputizing of a whole vigilante force to hunt down abortion providers and anyone who seeks to aid someone from gaining access to an abortion — all of that was just upheld. Sure, abortion providers can then sue — with what resources I’m not sure — after they’re having to pay. It’s insane. What to me is even more infuriating in some ways than the fascist Supreme Court, is people continue going on business as normal. People’s lives are totally being foreclosed, not to go to the worst case scenario, because anyone being prevented from getting access to abortion. Right now, there are victims of incest who cannot access an abortion. There are 10 year olds or 12 year olds who cannot get get an abortion and have not been able to get an abortion for the past over 100 days in the state of Texas after six weeks. It’s outrageous and I don’t understand why we’re in a situation now where that fury that people should feel for pregnant folks and folks that could become pregnant in Texas and Mississippi, in all these states that will likely lose access to abortion immediately if Roe is overturned, why people aren’t raising bloody hell right now.

Jessica Prozinski 43:10

Yeah, that is the question that we keep returning to. I have theories on most things in life. I think people think that the only practical, reasonable way to fight any of this is to fight through the vehicle of the Democratic Party. I think that our huge task is building an alternative to that, that people have faith in and, yeah, that could actually work. Yeah, just our own organizing. We need a mass movement. But there’s all these ingredients that go into it that are really hard to predict. To see the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020, in some ways, it seemed like it came out of the blue, but we know it definitely didn’t. That anger and rage is simmering there in the background, and sometimes it erupts. I definitely predict that if the Supreme Court essentially overturns Roe v Wade in the summer, there’s going to be a huge backlash. People are going to come into the streets. Those of us who are seasoned activists and who are thinking ahead to that moment, really need to figure out what do we do with that energy? When we have that scene, how do we direct it? How do we guide it? How do we try to keep people in the streets? How do we not have it just be diverted into campaigning for the Democrats? I think there’s really a lot of unanswered questions about what our strategy and tactics should be. We know the bottom line, you got to build a mass movement. But I think there’s a lot of interesting questions within that, that I’ve been trying to pick apart. Do we go to the Supreme Court? Do we go to the Pink House in Jackson, Mississippi, and have a national mobilization and where we try to keep it open, despite the fact that it’s not legal anymore? What are the things that we can do that can inspire people and make people feel like we actually have a chance of winning?

Sam Goldman 44:57

Yeah, I also have been thinking on similar lines about the anniversary of the Roe decision in January. It is a day in which the fascist character of the “pro-life movement” is made crystal clear. They descend on DC, and they have been doing it for decades. Having the national spotlight, it’s very difficult to break through in DC on that day. But I feel like this year, it would be so fucking important to get a pro-abortion message that we’re not gonna allow people to be slammed backwards. I genuinely don’t know what that strategy is, how you break through, but I feel like there is an opportunity and that people, including people in the media, are paying attention to the story, the story of the Supreme Court. If you have any thoughts on that, I’d be happy to hear.

Jessica Prozinski 46:00

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think that one of our opportunities is the anniversary of Roe. That’s gonna be one of our chances to do what we can.

Sam Goldman 46:06

Going back to what we were talking about with what you did. Yes, we do need massive numbers of people in the streets raising bloody hell. I also do think that we need those people who get it now, like you do and the people who are with you do, to break through the silence and just go out and take action with the numbers they have. I think that models for people the type of thing that we need to see many, many more places where people are uncompromising in demanding abortion rights and abortion access. I wanted to close out with: We’ve been talking about abortion and what will work and what won’t work in terms of maintaining the right to abortion. What will work in terms of people getting out there and demanding it and what won’t work, as you wrote in your piece for Left Voices about just being a tail on the Democratic Party and going along with their program. I just wanted to bring back the idea that what’s going on with abortion rights, as essential as that is, it’s not happening in a political ecosystem where that’s all that’s going on. You still have these institutions that are running business as usual. We’re in a situation where the assault on abortion is part of this whole fascist remaking, where a whole party is going for unrestrained white supremacy, patriarchy, and the most vengeful America First chauvinism, and that is enforced through open and aggressive brute force, a dictatorship that tramples on and shreds the rule of law or weaponizes that law into an instrument of further violence and terror, and accompanied by a whole mob culture where you have the violence from the state, but you also have the violence from the thugs that we saw are still on the march in DC, like the Patriot prayer folks who got all the way to the Capitol with the support of the police. This is the situation that we’re in. I think it really does take us looking at the full picture in which this fight for abortion rights is being waged. I just wanted to get any closing thoughts that you had on that.

Jessica Prozinski 48:14

We can win the majority of the country behind our program, because the Trump program is just — it’s fake. It’s not going to get even any of his supporters anywhere or anything. We have to be equally or more bold as the left-wing and putting forward our ideas and taking these bold actions. It’s not comfortable at all. You just have to take the step. You just have to jump out there because the alternative is just too terrible to contemplate. I am hopeful. I’ve seen so many things, so many successes and victories. When you’re marching with people, it’s a feeling of power and connection like nothing else. I do absolutely have hope.

Sam Goldman 48:52

Thank you so much for joining us, Jessica and sharing your experience with us. I hope that folks take some inspiration out of this. Go look in the show notes, you will find the article I referenced that Jessica wrote about the action.

Jessica Prozinski 49:06

Thank you so much. It was great talking to you. Thank you for your work.

Sam Goldman 49:10

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Thanks to Richie Marini, Paul Street, Lina Thorne, and Mark Tinkleman for helping produce this episode. Thanks to incredible volunteers, we have transcripts available for each episode, so be sure to visit RefuseFascism.org and sign up to get them in your inbox each week. We’ll be back next Sunday. Until then, In the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America!