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

Episode 111 Refuse Fascism

Mon, 5/16 6:29AM • 32:34

Sam Goldman    00:22

Welcome to Episode 111 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in the United States.

Before we get to today’s show, I want to give a shout out to supporters of Refuse Fascism. We couldn’t do the show without you. Be sure to rate and review and share this show to help us reach more listeners like you who care about the fascist threat. And of course, subscribe and follow so you never miss an episode. With all the big monetized shows that have staff and publicists, we appreciate that you value what we have to say. We read all your reviews, emails, comments tweets. So after listening to this episode, please share your thoughts with us. You can leave us a voicemail, go to anchor.fm/refuse-fascism and click the message button. 

This weekend we saw two futures and two forces juxtaposed, on the one hand women and people of all genders marching non-violently, but in fury, in massive numbers against the medieval morality of banning abortion, and on the other hand, the horrific fascist violence in Buffalo, and threats of more violence coming from the Trump rally in Austin, Texas. Saturday, people gathered in more than 400 cities in response to the draft opinion written by Samuel Alito, that shows the Supreme Court has already voted to overturn Roe and are just debating now how to couch that decision, and whether to explicitly cite people who burned witches in the decision to allow abortion bans to proceed in a majority of US states. These protests were a beautiful outpouring of rage, and it must continue and spread very quickly over the next couple of weeks. We’ll be sharing some of the voices from one of the protests held in New York City. This one that will share from was at Union Square. 

But whether it seems related to this outpouring or not the fascist massacre in Buffalo that targeted a majority Black neighborhood grocery store, is part of the dynamic we’re faced with too. The fascists have been working on their terrorist base for decades, indoctrinating people like this mass shooter with hate-filled white supremacy, and this shooting is just one in a series of horrific murderous rampages that we all know will continue as long as that fascist movement continues to metastasize. The “replacement theory” which inspired the white supremacist fascist Buffalo shooter, and which has dominated stories on Tucker Carlson’s popular show on Fox News, is completely tied to Samuel Alito’s concern for the “domestic supply of infants” discussed in his draft opinion as one of the motivations for banning abortion. 

The fascist movement is moving quickly, inspired by the long hoped overturning of Roe to try to criminalize travel to states where abortion would still be legal, as well as criminalizing IUDs. Their ultimate goal, of course, is to ban abortion federally and impose their will on everyone everywhere, red or blue state and they are jubilantly rushing forward to force women into subservience. This is why we’re in an emergency situation right now, and why together we need to seize on our one real power to go out and change this situation by taking to the streets right now, and refusing to back down until they back off.

The Supreme Court is on track, as we’ve talked about in depth, to decimate the fundamental right to abortion. Within weeks, their plans have been made abundantly clear, crystal clear. This would be an atrocity. Forcing women to have children against their will is a form of enslavement. It would hit Black and other women of color especially hard and accelerate the theocratic Christian fascist juggernaut that isn’t limited to abortion, but is aimed at contraception, sex education, LGBTQ rights, voting rights, the rights of Black people more broadly and other people of color, immigrants and many more. But, and this is essential, this is not law yet.

To all the beautiful people that were out in the streets on May 14, I want to ask you to not listen to anyone who tells you that where you really need to focus your attention is creating cities that provide sanctuary to those seeking abortion care, even while that’s important, or the best that we can do is to stock up on plan B or Plan C, even though those resources are important. Most essentially, I want to tell you, I want to strongly urge you, to please not listen to anyone who dares tell you that where you really need to put your energy, what’s really more realistic, is to channel your fury that was in the streets and put it into voting for Democrats in the next election, after Roe has been overturned. No. No to all of these. It is far harder to win back a right once they have ripped it away than to defend it when you still have it.

Let’s be honest, the Democrats and others have fought for decades. They saw common ground with those driving this fanatical attack on abortion. What is needed is an uncompromising fight for the lives of women. We do this through relentless, relentless resistance. We do this by walking out of school and work. We do this by speaking out in the arts and sciences. We do this by disrupting business as usual. We do this through the sounds of our collective rage, and that disciplined fury of our actions. We do this by shattering the so-called legitimacy of the marble-halled institutions that would dare rip away women’s moral agency and very humanity. We do this because it’s right, and because we can do no other. It’s on all of us, and it’s possible to make clear to the women haters on the Supreme Court, and everywhere else, that if they take away the right to abortion, their society will be brought to a halt.

Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights is calling for student walkouts nationwide this Thursday, May 19, and a nationwide day of action to shut down business as usual on May 26. Find out more and get involved right now at RiseUp4AbortionRights.org. And I wanted to give a special shout out to the abortion rights protesters in Austin, Texas who marched with courage and anger past the Trump rally happening at the same time.

While a white supremacist was murdering people in Buffalo, New York, Ted Nugent was whipping up even more genocidal rage, reportedly telling the Trump supporters at the rally: “I love you, but I would love you more if you went out and just went berserk on the skulls of the Democrats and the Marxists and the communists.” So this is deadly serious, but it’s important to remember: we are the majority and we have right on our side and millions of people’s lives are in the balance. Now is the time to fight with everything we’ve got to stop the Supreme Court from decimating abortion rights. Now, here are some of the highlights from the rally held in New York City at Union Square on May 14.

Merle Hoffman    08:36

I want everyone here who has had an abortion, or knows somebody close to them who had one, to raise their hands. Look around you, look around you, what a constituency. One in four American women will have abortions in their lifetime. There are millions and millions of women who have had abortions since Roe. Millions of mothers. An abortion is a mother’s act. The act of choosing whether or not to have a child is often an act of love, and very often an act of survival.

I have been asked recently, where were you when you heard that the decision may come down? Where were you? It was sort of like 9/11, remember when everybody was asking you where were you? It was that degree of outrage and shock. My first thought was, how could they? How dare they? Even though I’ve been through the murder of friends and lived on the frontline of the abortion wars for 51 years, had death threats [crowd cheers]. 51 years, and I’m still here. [more cheers] I have been threatened with bombs, continual harassment, evicted two times. George Tiller, a good friend, was shot in the head, but we keep going. [crowd cheers] Yes, we keep going. [louder cheers]

I thought there were boundaries to their rectitude, their cruelty and their ambition. How could they be so bold to think that women’s lives and women’s dreams are theirs to define and control? [crowd: No] How could they reverse a fundamental human and civil right that has been stitched into the fabric of this society? Well, they could, and it looks like they just might, but we will be bolder and bolder and bolder. [cheers] We are here to state that women must retain the moral, legal and constitutional right over her decision whether or not and when to become a mother. [cheers] Your body is your country and you are the only resident. [cheers]

This is not about love and concern for babies, or even what or if or not in the Constitution. This is about power. This is a power struggle. Enforcing a Christian fundamentalist ideology on to our most private of decisions. This is about a democratic republic becoming a theocracy. [cheers] Do you smell what I smell? The whiff of an inquisition coming. No exceptions for rape or incest, none for ectopic pregnancies. Fetal homicide charges for the woman, life for a doctor. [crowd: boo]

51 years ago, I held the hand of the first patient who came to Choices. Her name was Helen and she was white, married, Catholic, three children, but she could not afford to have an abortion. I stayed with her, held her hand, and her story is still in my heart. Now, 51 years later, I’m seeing patients who are coming from Texas and Kentucky and other states. And you know, it can’t be, and we have to stop it. I also remember where I was when I heard about the Hyde Amendment, and I heard Republican Congressman Henry Hyde say, if we can’t save all the babies, we’re going to save the babies of the poor. So he cut off Medicaid funding for poor women. And it stands today, do you know that? [crowd jeers] The Hyde Amendment is voted on every single year. Republican and Democratic presidents let it stand, so we must demand the end of Hyde. [large cheer]

Now I want to ask for a moment of silence for all of us to think about all the people and the women who have lost their lives in dark back alleys, who have laid their bodies down because they wanted the right to choose. We owe it to them and we owe it to our children and our grandchildren not to have this happen to another generation. [cheers] Sometimes they say to me, why are you always going around with that hanger? You know… it’s so depressing. It’s so negative. Well, you know, I like to live in reality, and the hanger is depressing, it is negative, and the reality is that without access to legal safe abortion, in the past, women used household objects to deal with trying to get rid of an unwanted pregnancy.

So people say: Well, that won’t happen again, because everybody can come to New York. But they can’t all come to New York. And then they say: But they can get pills. But not everybody can take pills, and they’re coming after that also. This is why we’re here and this is why we have to continue to fight in the streets; a great rising. Make no mistake, we are entering very dark times — I would say back to the Dark Ages — so each one of us has to be a focus of light in that darkness. [cheer] The power of the state must stop at our skin. Your body is your country. Your dreams are your own. Protect and defend them. [large cheer] Rise up! Rise up for our bodies, our lives.

Rosita Romero    16:45

The Dominican Women’s Development Center has been advocating for women’s rights, abortion rights, for over 33 years. [cheer] We understand that abortion is about deciding when to have a child, with whom to have a child, and how to have a child. We will be damned if we are going to let white men decide what to do with our bodies. [cheer] That’s why we’re saying we are not going back. We are not going back to the back alleys. We are not going back to the butcher jobs. We support abortion, not only in the United States, but also in Latin America and throughout the world. Also, very important, we want to make sure that all religion is taken out of this. We say: Take your rosaries out of our cuchi cuchis. [large cheer] [Spanish follows] Thank you.

Rosita Romero    18:58

Now, it is my pleasure to welcome our next speaker: attorney and author, and a former member of the United States House of Representatives and New York City Comptroller. Please welcome Elizabeth Holtzman. [cheer]

Elizabeth Holtzman    19:24

Thank you very much. You look great. You are great. [small cheers throughout] I feel the energy, not just to this crowd, but there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, all over this country saying no to the Supreme Court. [large cheer] We are powerful, and they better start shaking in their boots. [cheer] More than half this country is made up of women, [cheer] and there are some men who love us too. They care about what’s going to happen.

We’re here because we are angry and because we are demanding that we be treated as full legal human beings under the law. Nobody owns my body. New York State doesn’t own my body. [two entities are mentioned and get large cheers, but are indecipherable]    The United States of America doesn’t own my body. And for sure those five people on the Supreme Court, the Ayatollahs of America, they don’t own my body. And the Constitution, in the 13th Amendment says, that we don’t have servitude in this country anymore. Nobody has the right to take our bodies for some other use than what we want — no one.

And the future is grim indeed, if this group of hostile people, who are hostile judges, who are hostile to women and to women’s rights, can control us, then where are we going to be in terms of any rights? Because if they can interfere with the rights of more than half the population, nobody is safe. [cheers] There’s a very famous comment that comes out of the experience of the Nazi regime in Germany. And this pastor said, when the Nazis first came for the communists, I didn’t care. I wasn’t a communist. I didn’t say anything. And then they came for the socialists, and I wasn’t a socialist and I didn’t say anything. And then they came for the Protestants and I wasn’t a Protestant, so I didn’t say anything. And then they came for me and there was no one to stand up for me. [cheer]

They can’t dare take the rights away from America’s women. And who are these judges? Just about all of them are illegitimately on the court. [large cheer] Clarence Thomas, did he tell the truth about Anita Hill? [crowd: No] Brett Kavanaugh, did we have a full investigation of what happened? [crowd: No] No. And what about Amy Coney Barrett? [crowd: boo] She was rammed in at the last minute. And what about the other judge who was appointed because Merrick Garland was kept out of office; Obama wasn’t allowed to have a choice for eight months. [boos] Illegitimate. They’re not taking our rights away.

And one other thing, it’s not just that they’re taking the rights away from women — and by the way, it’s not just grown women, we’re talking about children and young girls who are victims of incest and rape [cheers], imagine — what they are saying is that this wasn’t a deep seated right in the Constitution, [aside, presumably responding to someone: I’ll be finished in one second] But — and they cite judges and jurists who said we weren’t in the Constitution and women have no rights. If you cite people from the 16th and 17th and 18th century who were against women’s rights, period, who said women were property, that husbands could beat them, that they can rape them, that they had basically no rights, these are the people we should listen to today? [crowd: No] Are we going to ask slave owners what rights Black people should have today? Are we going to ask Hitler what rights Jews have today? They can’t be asking these women haters from 300 years ago what rights women have today. When he was fighting, Martin Luther King said, how much longer? Not much longer. We will win. [cheers]

Sunsara Taylor    24:53

In Rise Up for Abortion Rights, we have been sounding the alarm since the time I first heard the case last December, that is now coming to a decision. We have been sounding the alarm. We have been rallying people. We have been calling on people to fill the streets to stop this from going down. And now that there has been a leak, millions have been jolted awake. Millions can see what’s happening. And so, it is so beautiful, it is so important, that millions are waking up and thousands and tens of thousands are in the streets today. Not just as the 40-some rallies that Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights has held, but at rallies across this country by Planned Parenthood and MoveOn and other organizations.

We need this. But, we also need real talk, sisters and brothers and beautiful people, we need real talk, because just as this shockwave alarm is spreading, just as people are coming out into the streets, there is also a wilder and wilder drumbeat, fueled first by Democratic Party politicians and by so-called leaders who are tied to them, that the most realistic thing we can do is channel our energies off the streets and into the elections in the fall. [crowd emphatically: No.] This is something that the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian, who I follow, has warned about in an important new article at revcom.us. And he makes the point, and I’m gonna make the point, that our power is out here in the streets.

Not only is waiting until November too late, the Supreme Court will already have ruled by then. It’s too late. We need to stop them now. But the truth is that voting is not the way any fundamental right has ever been won. It’s not the way any progress has been made. Think about it. Even our right to vote was not won by a voting. It was won by sitting in, by walking out, by marching, by freedom riding, by going to jail, by going on hunger strikes, by walking across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma Alabama, [cheering throughout] knowing that there were brutal white supremacists law enforcement and good ‘ol boy klansmen on the other side waiting to inflict barbaric violence. It took standing up.

The Incredible abolitionist and freedom fighter and former slave, Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will.” [cheer] On an even deeper level, sisters and brothers, beautiful people, these Democrats, they pose as champions of women and the oppressed, but the truth is they have facilitated this assault on women’s fundamental right to abortion over decades. Over decades they have sought common ground with these religious theocrats. There can be no common ground with those who would enslave women. They have run anti-abortion candidates and they have ceded the high level ground to these theocrats and Christian fascists. What else does it mean to say, as Hillary Clinton and so many others did for years, that abortion should be safe, legal and rare? As if there’s something wrong with it.

There is nothing wrong with abortion. There is nothing wrong with women controlling their bodies, their lives, their destiny. That is a great thing. [building cheers] That is a beautiful thing. We need abortion on demand without apology. And here’s another thing that these Democrats don’t want to say and that so much of the movement doesn’t want to say, that assault on abortion has always been about controlling women. [cheer] And it’s always been about controlling women. It’s not about healthcare in    the abstract. Of course abortion is healthcare, but clinics aren’t bombed because it’s healthcare, they’re bombed because abortion gives women control over their lives and their destinies. [large cheer]

Sam Goldman    29:46

That was, in order of speaking. Merle Hoffman, Rosita Romero, Elizabeth Holtzman and Sunsara Taylor. Overturn Roe, hell no. Stop the Supreme Court from taking away the right to abortion. Abortion on Demand and Without Apology. Rise Up for Abortion Rights is calling for two days of action: The next two Thursdays, Thursday, May 19 and Thursday, May 26. May 19: National Green Up and Walk-out. Everyone wearing and displaying green everywhere. Students and youth walk out of school and head downtown to spread the word. And Thursday, May 26, they’re calling on people to shut the country down, at noon, leave work, leave school, converge in the streets. No business as usual. You can learn more and sign up at RiseUp4AbortionRights.org

Sam Goldman    30:50

Thanks for listening to Refuse Fascism. I want to hear from you. Share your thoughts, questions, ideas for topics or guests or lend a skill. Tweet me at Sam B Goldman or you can drop me a line at Samantha Goldman at Refuse Fascism.org, or leave a voicemail by visiting anchor.fm/refuse-fascism and click the Message button. And if you want to support the show, it’s simple. Show us some love by rating and reviewing on Apple podcasts or your listening platform of choice and, of course. follow Subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Chip in to support our pod and content creation to help people understand and act to stop the fascist threat. You can donate by visiting RefuseFascism.org and hitting the Donate button there. Thanks to Richie Marini, 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.