Episode 265
This week we’re sharing the presentation Sunsara Taylor gave at the mass organizing meeting in Los Angeles on Sept. 20, plus a brief recap of just some of the developments over the past week, both positive (Jimmy Kimmel was reinstated after groundswell of outrage) and ominous (the regime’s declaration they are going to target “antifa” now), among many others.
Watch Sunsara on the RNL (Revolution Nothing Less) Show and hear her speak at a mass meeting near you in the coming weeks.
Statement from Refuse Fascism on Donald Trump’s Executive Order Against “Antifa”
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Music for this episode: Penny the Snitch by Ikebe Shakedown
Episode 265 Defeating Trump MAGA Fascism CAN Be Done… But We Have to Do It
Sun, Sep 28, 2025 5:24PM • 54:24
Sam Goldman 00:22
Welcome to episode 265 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. This is Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism works unite all who can be united to drive out the Trump fascist regime through mass, relentless, nonviolent resistance.
Today we’re sharing Sunsara Taylor’s presentation at the Trump Must Go Now! mass organizing meeting in L.A. along with an introduction by Juan Jose. This was recorded on September 20. If you’re listening and you find the show meaningful, take a moment after listening, of course, to rate and review the Refuse Fascism podcasts. Wherever you listen, your review helps more people discover this conversation and join the movement to drive out Trump and the whole fascist regime. And of course, don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. First, we want to start off with an important lesson on the Jimmy Kimmel victory with him being back on the air. Listen to Sunsara Taylor.
Sunsara Taylor 01:26
All right, so Jimmy Kimmel is back on the air tonight, and this is fucking fantastic, but there are three lessons we should draw from this.
Number one, the only reason Jimmy is back on the air is because people spoke up, people acted out, people protested. I was there, prominent people, celebrities, journalists, artists, performers, musicians of all kinds put their neck on the line. They stuck their necks out there for basic rights to free speech, to dissent, to stand up and broader — the broader principle of it. This mattered. We showed ourselves. There’s a lot of us.
Number two, Donald Trump is a petulant, vengeful fascist tyrant, and he will strike back. This is a man who got up at Charlie Kirk’s funeral and said: I hate my opponents; I want I don’t want what’s best for them. This is a vengeful maniac. He ran on a campaign promising I am your retribution, and he’s weaponizing the Justice Department to go after anybody who has ever opposed him. He’s not gonna lay down and take this. He’s going to double down, and he’s gonna do it on many fronts at once, and we have to be ready for it.
Which brings me to point 3, 11/5 — November 5. We have to be in D.C., every single one of us; all the artists, all the prominent people, all the regular people, all the teachers, all the students, everybody. We have to be in D.C., 11/5, to demand this whole Trump fascist regime must be removed from power. They gotta go, because Trump will not slow down, he will not stop he will not be constrained. He’s got the Supreme Court backing him up. He’s got his unidentified, unaccountable ICE agents funded — more funded than the U.S. Marines or most militaries around the world, and they are not slowing down.
They have to be removed. They have to be removed from power. We just showed our strength. We showed how through our actions, through our outrage, through our vocal opposition, we can compel realignments among powerful forces. This time, it was among the tops of Disney and ABC and the rest of them, but we could do the same for the highest echelons of U.S. government, if we act. But time is running out. Time is definitely running out. There are millions, tens of millions of us. We are the majority, but we have to make it felt. 11/5, Washington, D.C., in the biggest nonviolent, but mass determined outpouring in U.S. history, demanding: Trump, you gotta go — The Trump Fascist Regime Must Go Now. Spread the word. Get your friends there, D.C. 11/5.
Sam Goldman 04:07
Before we hear more on why flooding D.C. on November 5 is our best, our only chance to stop the consolidation of fascism in this country, and how we can make this the biggest mobilization in U.S. history, there have been an extraordinary number of developments on the fascist front this week. It would take hours just to talk about them all, but I want to walk through the framework for understanding these events, how this is fascism, and where we are at in their consolidation of power. This is by no means exhaustive, but I think is worth a moment.
Last Sunday, thousands gathered in Arizona for a memorial for Charlie Kirk, a rebranding of a pathetic fascist sophist into a saint and martyr on the level of Jesus Christ himself. This was a pyrotechnically curated call for war against everyone that Trump hates, in a framework that denies the extraordinary scale of right wing political violence and attributes the violence from any 4chan creep, which is itself a right wing cultural phenomena, to “liberal” and “left” organizations in the broadest possible terms.
That has set the stage for a range of executive actions and speeches throughout the week determined to eradicate not just anti- fascism, but any and all critique or challenge of the Trump regime. Trump started the week by issuing an executive order designating “antifa” — an intentionally vague category — as a “domestic terrorist organization.” Please note, this is not a legal category. Trump has outlined and is seeking to criminalize all kinds of activities. This conjured up version of “antifa” supposedly engages in, some of which are completely legal.
He has empowered agencies to “investigate, disrupt and dismantle any and all illegal operations, especially those involving terrorist actions conducted by antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of antifa, or for which antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of antifa provided material support, including necessary investigatory and prosecutorial actions against those who fund such operations.”
On Thursday, Trump signed National Security Presidential memorandum, NSPM7, Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence. This memo goes even further than Monday’s executive order that tried to slap the label of “terrorist organization” on the vague catchall of “antifa.” This was a national security directive. It’s important to understand that this is essentially a broad policy order that guides defense, intelligence, law enforcement all at once. Unlike an order, a memo doesn’t have to cite constitutional authority, but it still carries the force of law.
As Ken Klippenstein noted this week: This is tailor made for a president who says things like, it’s not illegal if it saves the country. And here’s the kicker: This so called Terror memo demands a massive re-allocation of resources, but because it’s a memo, it conveniently avoids triggering a budgetary impact statement from the Office of Management and Budget. I really encourage people to go through this terror memo in its entirety. Take note of how “terror” covers trespass, civil disorder, even so called “predicate actions.”
Note too, what “funding” is made to mean. Trump has ordered the Justice Department, the FBI and other national security agencies to go after what he calls, “political violence” by turning the Joint Terrorism Task Force inward against the people of this country. His directive, NSPM7, doesn’t just target groups. Once again, it goes after individuals and entities flagged for so called “indica of violence.”
What does that mean? It means if you’re anti-capitalist, or even just espouse a particular anti-capitalist view or anti-racist, pro-immigrant, pro-gender equality, if you challenge “traditional ideas” of family, religion or morality, this could brand you as a domestic terrorist. This is the criminalization of ideas. NSPM7 never even mentions the First Amendment, the right to free speech, the right to assembly. Instead, it weaponizes counter terrorism to crush dissent right here at home. And by using the existing Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Trump regime side steps Congress, hides their activity, and avoids oversight altogether.
So it’s really important to call this what it is, a declaration of war on anyone who refuses to bow to the Trump fascist agenda. Stephen Miller’s speech at the announcement of the memo shows how they are anticipating, even anxious for, any violence that they themselves are not openly committing, prepared to seize on such chaos that they have unleashed to disrupt, denounce, and destroy their perceived enemies and all who they deem subhuman. Acting upon this, Trump sent troops in “full force” to Portland.
Attorney General Pam Bondi delivered a disturbed speech, laden with hysterical lies, to justify vicious repression against political protest and speech outside ICE facilities, her threats were brought to life last night in the suburbs of Chicago by border patrol and ATF outside the Broadview detention facility, raining down a whole new level of violence on those righteously protesting ICE Gestapo and the journalists on the scene. Together, these are blatant fascist moves to criminalize dissent and muzzle speech. Every person, every organization who stands for justice needs to condemn, oppose, and refuse to cooperate with this.
It is not hard to imagine — in fact, it’s already begun — Trump using this to conduct extremely repressive actions against those who defend immigrants with nonviolent civil disobedience, as well as those who mobilize in other ways against Trump. or merely dare to state the truth, illustrated by this very executive order and memo; that Trump is a fascist one who has already clamped down the foundations of a fascist order and is hell bent to spread and reinforce the tentacles of that and to eliminate all opposition.
This has to be taken very seriously. and be strongly opposed by actual massive and exponentially intensifying political, nonviolent action exposing and opposing Trump’s fascist regime — both on the upcoming protests organized by the no Kings Day Coalition, which we are proud to endorse on Saturday October 18, and especially the Wednesday, November 5, “Fall of the Trump Regime” mobilization aiming for a million people to fill the streets of D.C. — nonviolent protests to demand: Trump Must Go Now, and to not stop protesting in D.C. until fascist Trump is removed from office. This mobilization was initiated by RefuseFascism.org, and I want to state for those who might know that this is an organization that since its inception in 2016 has had nonviolence as a bedrock principle for all its activities and advocacy, and is open to all.
What I’ve said already has not been the totality of what we’ve seen this week. This has come together with Trump’s aggressive attempts to purge government and the political establishment of anyone who has not professed enduring loyalty to himself and the MAGA movement. He fired FBI agents who bent their knee in 2020 in a show of sympathy for the George Floyd uprising. He got the Supreme Court to approve his firing of Rebecca Slaughter, the last Democratic leader of the FTC, and to green light his withholding of $4 billion in foreign aid, which will quite literally kill people, while also further eroding the separation of powers that are fundamental to this constitutional order. He injected one of his zealous personal attorneys into the ranks of the federal prosecutors to secure an indictment against James Comey.
Meanwhile, he fired a career U.S. Attorney for merely reminding ICE that they are subject to laws and must follow them. As a government shutdown looms, thousands of federal workers are bracing for layoffs after the White House threatened mass firings if an agreement isn’t reached to avoid a government shutdown.
Now want to take a moment to talk about something very different, the anti-science lunacy. In a televised press conference from the White House, Trump and RFK Jr. stood together to announce a bold initiative to “tackle the autism epidemic.” As ludicrous as this event was on its face, this initiative ties together many of the strands of the fascist program — from their attacks on science to their stigmatizing of people with autism and those who are neurodivergent generally, their hatred of women, and their distain for a culture of respect and acceptance of others.
Trump and Kennedy’s assertions that Tylenol use by pregnant people causes autism are adamantly opposed by the medical community, who largely insist that Tylenol is by far the safest painkiller to use during pregnancy. This lines up very well with many of the Christian fascists animating this American fascism, who believe that the suffering of women is somehow good or sacred, that women are born to create babies, and that the pain of childbirth is punishment for their gender. Unlike Tylenol, there is ample evidence of the harm fevers can cause during pregnancies, and that Tylenol helps reduce that risk.
Their assertions that they’ve found the cause of the autism epidemic run roughshod over the fact that the meteoric rise in autism rates correspond largely to expanding diagnostic criteria and education, and that there is still much to learn about autism and why it is increasing in prevalence. While their easy fixes of blaming vaccines and now Tylenol, have been proven false, their insistence on “curing autism” paints autistic people as a problem; a scourge on society. Their position is hostile to the notion that society can and should accept, embrace neurodivergence, because they openly believe that divergence should be punished.
Their idealized, “golden age of America,” the 1950s, was the height of eugenics and lobotomies. From global warming to evolution, from environmental protections to public health, from political violence to even election results, the Fascists have declared that facts are irrelevant and that they alone determine reality in line with their fascist aims. This is a foundational threat to the core functioning of society. Eroding the very notion of evidence based thinking destroys any meaningful political discourse. But it does not stop there. Every day they are allowed to remain in power, medical research is defunded, agencies are purged, indoctrination grows stronger, proven medicines are restricted, and the physical infrastructure of our society becomes more vulnerable. These are absurdities that are laying the groundwork for atrocities.
And last but not least, the United States Christian crusader, Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth has called for hundreds of generals and admirals to leave their posts around the world and fly to Virginia, ostensibly to inoculate them with the “warrior ethos.” We really don’t know what that means in this particular moment when they are deploying troops to multiple American cities, purging the military of anyone in command who sees the Constitution as paramount to Trump’s orders, bragging about how bad ass they are for illegally bombing civilian vessels in the Caribbean, and so much more.
Lieutenant General Ben Hodges of the army aptly compared it to the famous meeting of German military brass in 1935, where they were required to each swear a personal oath to the Fuhrer. Hegseth responded on X saying, “cool story general,” simultaneously showcasing the fascist disdain for anyone who might have a problem with them following Hitler’s playbook. Trump is now set to attend and speak at this mysterious meeting. Fascism is not looming, it is upon us now. It is urgently needed that the millions of decent people in this country rise up to drive out the Trump fascist regime. With that, here is Juan Jose Gutierrez, the Executive Director of Full Rights for Immigrants Coalition, and Sunsara Taylor, co-initiator of and national leader of RefuseFascism.org, speaking at the Trump Must Go Now mass organizing meeting on September 20.
Juan Jose Gutierrez 16:25
As you’re going to hear today, we need to mobilize millions and millions of American people to come to Washington, D.C. to express their will and their determination to stop the Donald Trump fascist regime. In those conversations, one of the ideas that I consider a main, core idea of what needs to be happening right now is what we’re doing right now — which is to convene as many organizations and leaders and organizers and curious people that want to do something about what’s going on in this country today with the foul Trump fascist regime.
What was made clear to me is that we need to reach out to all people, to all organizations, to all individuals that want to do something about what’s going on, even members of the Democratic Party that are not happy with what the party is doing and their politics on how to deal effectively with the fascist Donald Trump regime. Would it be a good investment of our time to deal with representatives of the various groupings within the Democratic Party?
So I processed that idea, and I’m just going to give you a quick rundown of what we’ve been doing to refuse fascism — countless press conferences, hopeful events, mobilizations, marches, rallies, etc. We participated in the No Kings Bay March and concentration in downtown L.A., trying to bring different constituencies with different points of view to this type of activity. The Labor Day Parade, which was very impressive, but still very constrained in terms of what voices can get involved in the process of making the different views that need to be heard, and provided a forum so that people can hear the ideas of different voices and different political interests that have something to say about how best to deal with this fascist regime.
Mexican Day Parade is mostly a cultural parade, but nonetheless, thousands and thousands of community people from the Mexican community and other segments of the Latino community come together. They need to hear the message, so we’ve been going there to just today, we got involved with a group of individuals. They have launched a movement called the Saver America movement. We had a congregation of several hundred people, some very important people. It was interesting to see the mayor of the city of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, be there, joining and saying: This is a city of immigrants; We need to fight for immigrants, et cetera, et cetera. You start hearing the word ‘fascism’ to describe the type of government that is in power already in this country.
Reverend William Barber II, the moral inheritor of the Christian tradition, of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, that was, you know that was a platform used by Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King back in the 60s, and other individuals, important individuals, community, people, affected communities. So we’re doing everything that we can to bring organizations to lead. Leaders and organizers like all of you here today, because we have challenges that we’re going to have to work very, very hard and commit to if we’re going to have a living chance that we’re going to be able to outdo and eventually get rid of the Donald Trump fascist regime. With that, I have nothing more to say.
Sunsara Taylor 20:25
Fascism is not a looming threat. It is upon us now. Humanity’s only hope is for the decent people of this country to rise in our millions. We cannot wait for future and rigged elections. We must drive the Trump fascist regime from power. Beginning November 5th, the one year anniversary of Trump’s re election, we must flood D.C. in nonviolent protests. Surround the White House, surround the Capitol, surround the illegitimate fascist packed Supreme Court. Come back again and again.
Across the country, people need to refuse to comply. Every single person of conscience, millions of us, tens of millions of us together, must grind the machinery of the fascist regime to a halt, and we must not stop until this regime is removed from power. These are the opening words of this call for the fall of the Trump fascist regime, initiated by RefuseFascism.org and open to all, and every organization and every individual of conscience across this country. This is a call for a truly historic outpouring, the biggest in U.S. history, millions and millions of us, nonviolent, but determined, November 5, Washington, D.C.
This is the only way, the only way, the only real hope that humanity has to defeat the terrible fascism that is accelerating by the day. Today, I’m going to get into why this is true, why this is our only hope, and we will look at how this massive nonviolent mobilization from below can interact with the very real and sharpening divisions at the top of society, including the divisions within the ruling institutions of government, in such a way that this regime, this Trump fascist regime, is actually removed from power.
And today, we’re going to get into together how each one of us, and all of us together, are going to work concretely to make this a reality. Because the terrible truth is that while November 5th and this mobilization really is humanity’s only hope of defeating this fascism, it’s only hope to achieve a decent future, not nearly enough people know about this yet, and not nearly enough people are organizing and fighting for it. It is up to us to change this immediately. This means we have to spread this call for the fall of the Trump fascist regime everywhere by the hundreds of thousands, to everyday people everywhere.
It means we need to, as Juan Jose spoke about, go to every organization, every other organization around social justice issues, immigrant rights, every indivisible chapter, every 5051, chapter, every campus group, everybody we can, and win them to take up the fight for November 5th as their own. This means we need to fight to make October 18th, No Kings Day Two, even more massive than the first. This means we need to springboard off of October 18th to make November 5th in Washington, D.C., such a massive outpouring that the entire world takes note — such a massive and powerful outpouring that people all across this country wake up and many more millions join us in big cities and small towns, just as they rose up in 2020 against the police murder of George Floyd.
There are millions and millions who hate what is happening, we need a powerful enough mobilization that we call them in behind us, to flood D.C. in wave upon wave and to rise up where they are. We need to be so powerful that this political earthquake, this nonviolent rising from below, interacts with the very sharp divides within the ruling structures of this society, such that those who are in position to do so are compelled to remove Trump — to actually remove him from power. This is our historic mission. So let’s get into this. The call for the fall of the Trump fascist regime says: Fascism, a different form of brutal rule, it cannot be lived with. It must be defeated.
This call makes clear what this means to call it fascism. It says: The Trump fascist regime is shredding the rule of law, making a mockery of due process, illegitimately deploying the military on U.S. soil, disappearing immigrants and other brown skin people into brutal concentration camps, aggressively resurrecting open genocidal white supremacy, reversing the gains, not only of the 1960s but even of the Civil War and Reconstruction, enslaving women through the brutality and the suffocation of forced motherhood, erasing LGBT people, trampling democratic rights, violating international law, assaulting and threatening politicians and judges, and paving the way for boundless terror against the people.
The regime is accelerating climate collapse. It is cutting science and medicine. It is costing millions and millions of lives. It is depleting humanity’s store of knowledge. It is destroying the truth, drowning out reason, subjugating the arts to fascist cruelty and conformity. This regime is targeting everything that is decent, moral and good, all at the whim of a lunatic, fascist tyrant. Every word that I just read from this call is true. It’s being borne out every day and brutal reality. It is really happening. It is upon us now, and it is accelerating.
Just this week, after the horrific, very wrong, assassination of Charlie Kirk, Stephen Miller, that dead eyed ghoul who is the right hand of Trump, said, and I quote: “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these radical left networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.” When Steve Miller talks about safety like this, he’s not talking about safety for immigrants or Black people or trans people or women or free speech or comedians or our rights or our future.
He’s not talking about our safety. And when he talks about the American people, he is not talking about the people in this room. He is talking about again, going back to the way it was safe for the American people, again, because in his eyes, in Trump’s eyes, in the eyes of this regime, this country has always and must again, belong only to those who conform to their white, male supremacist, Christian fascist outlook and identity. When Stephen Miller talks about disrupting radical left networks, let’s be clear, he is talking about millions and millions of people. Never forget, this is a man who went on international TV and said that the Democratic Party is a domestic extremist organization.
These people are going for the kill, and they are moving rapidly. Some people who are associated with the Trump fascist regime have even talked about the assassination of Charlie Kirk as their own Reichstag Fire moment. For those who don’t know, the Reichstag fire happened in 1933 in February in Germany, it was shortly after Hitler came to power. Somebody set fire to the main government building, and it burned to the ground. Historians have argued about who set the fire. It’s never been decisively confirmed, but many people believe the Nazis did it themselves.
But what is indisputable, and the more important fact, is that whoever set the fire, the Nazis seized on this. Hitler seized on this to declare a state of emergency, to suspend basic rights like the right to free speech, to a free press, to assemble to protest. He used it to criminalize and outlaw opposition parties, to round up communists and other dissidents, to disappear them, to shut down newspapers. The disappearances and the roundups of communists, this was the beginning of the concentration camps. This was the beginning of the terror that led to the death, the Holocaust, of 6 million Jews and the mass murder of communists and Roma people and the whole destruction of World War II behind it.
This is how it began. These fascists of today are openly talking about this being their Reichstag Fire moment. Here, I want to quote from something that was published just yesterday by the revolutionary leader and the architect of the new communism, Bob Avakian. He says: In declaring this their Reichstag fire, these Trump Maga forces are openly identifying with the Nazis — openly proclaiming that they are indeed fascists.” I want you to think about that. What does it mean? They’re invoking this history positively as their model, and they are moving forward precisely in this way right now, and it is accelerating by the hour.
This week, Trump said that he wants to designate Antifa an intentionally vague catchall category, as a terrorist organization. Trump has already demonstrated that once he identified some group as a terrorist organization, he is willing to deploy the military to summarily bomb and execute the people he says are terrorists. He did this again yesterday in the Caribbean Sea for the third time this month, without trial, without presenting evidence, in violation of domestic law and international law, he had the military assassinate people simply because Trump said they were terrorists. Then there’s ICE with a budget that is bigger than most militaries around the world. We’ve already seen the terror, the kidnapping, the disappearances, the brutality against people without papers, and including people with papers; anybody with brown skin, is fair game in their view.
We’ve seen people shipped to brutal concentration camps held in suffocating cells without water, with rotten food, with no medical care. Some of them shift to dungeons around the world. All of this is accelerating. Then there’s ICE’s role as a lawless, unchecked, unaccountable shock troop force for Donald Trump, however, he wants to deploy it against anybody he wants to. Already, many of these fascists, including Steve Bannon, are promising that they will deploy ice outside polling booths in 2026. think about the chill that will bring.
All of this is graphic illustration of a critical point that Bob Avakian has also made previously. I want to quote this. He wrote: “If this fascist regime is allowed to remain in power, everything that decent people have felt that they could rely on to seek justice will be brutally shut down. Every uplifting moral value will be reviled and repressed. Every sphere of society will be remade in terrible ways, in line with the male supremacist, anti LGBT white supremacist and anti-immigrant cruelty and the anti-scientific health and climate destroying madness of the Trump fascist regime and the blood thirsty ravings and depraved violence of fanatics who are heading the Department of War, with the deranged maniac Trump having his finger on the nuclear button.”
Bob Avakian goes on: “Every vision and every act of striving for a better and more just world, for a future worth living in, will be violently suppressed and effectively foreclosed, at least for the foreseeable future.” These are the stakes. This is what’s happening. So I want to return to the call that Refuse Fascism has issued. It reads: Hopes of waiting this out are illusions. Every accommodation, even in the name of preserving some ability to do some good, only fuels Trump’s demand, forever more, slavish submission. Every capitulation by universities, law firms, other agencies, and I would add, every firing and suspension in the media, only feeds the regime’s ravenous hunger to remake all of society and its grotesque image.
The elections are way too late. Besides, no honest person can expect a tyrant who instigated and then pardoned the January 6th insurrectionists to respect an election that he loses. All this is reality. We can’t hide from this reality. So I want to address something that we have heard as we’ve gone out and organized for November 5th, particularly here in California. A lot of people hate what Trump is doing, and they say: This sounds good, he should go.
But then it comes out that what they’re really passionate about, where they’re really putting their energies — those who are active — is into something like prop 50. Prop 50 is Gavin Newsom’s answer to the way that Republicans around the country are gerrymandering and rigging the next elections at the request and behest of Donald Trump. It’s an attempt to counteract that in California. This is a prop that’s supported and backed by Obama and by many progressive organizations. So a lot of people see this — they see that what the fascists are doing that is so illegitimate with this gerrymandering, and they’re excited that finally, finally, some Democrats are putting up some kind of fight in there, and they want to put their energy into this. I’m not here to tell you not to vote for Prop 50. I’m not here to tell you that.
There’s a logic to prop 50 on the terms of the election, if we were in normal times, just like there’s a logic to going jogging three times a week to keep your heart healthy in normal times. But if you’re having a heart attack and you are collapsed on the ground, unable to breathe in cardiac arrest, you don’t need to go running, you need an ambulance. You need emergency intervention. Right now, our rights, the lives of tens of millions of immigrants, the fate of science and health care here and around the world, the climate, women, trans people, all of our rights, our lives, our future, are in cardiac arrest, and we need emergency intervention. We cannot wait for the next election. We have to act now. [applause]
So our main efforts, whatever else you’re involved in — I know there’s people in the room today who are doing ICE watch, who are doing it tirelessly, who are organizing to protect their students, who are organizing in many different ways — we need to do all of this and step it up — but all of us need to come together in something that is big enough, that is comprehensive enough that it can stop this fascism in its tracks. That is something that none of us can do on our own, and it requires all of us to make our number one priority, no matter what else we’re involved in, our number one priority and daily preoccupation, is bringing millions and millions and millions of people to Washington, D.C. November 5th, the anniversary of Trump’s election — November 5th, to say: Trump Must Go Now!
We must launch a movement that drives this regime from power, because it will not be curbed. You cannot slow the fascists down. You cannot expect them to respect any guardrails you put in their path. We have to remove them from office. That requires all of us converging in the same place, the same time at the seat of power — where the whole world sees it, and no one can deny it — and not stop it until Trump is removed. So I want to ask the question and answer the question, because it’s a real question: Is it really possible to drive this regime from power? They are powerful. They’re on the tear. They’re on a rampage. They have the levers of the state, and they have so many people capitulating, one after the other. They have so many people in terror.
Is it possible? Yes, it is possible. It is absolutely possible. Guaranteed? No, but absolutely possible. I want to return to this call from Refuse Fascism and open to all. It says: “We have protested, marched, defended our neighbors from ICE, decried genocide. Some of us have resigned or blown the whistle. This shows that we are millions, many more of us than them.” I want to repeat that, many more of us who are opposed to this regime than support it. “Now we must take all of this higher. We must direct all of this energy and more towards the only thing that truly measures up to the existential threat that humanity faces. The whole fascist regime must be driven from power.”
Again, I’m continuing to read from this call. “This can be done by refusing to surrender the future and our humanity to a vengeful fascist maniac, by rising in our millions in massive, unrelenting, nonviolent protest and resistance, by defying and refusing to comply with fascist dictates, by walking out, by shutting down, by fearlessly using our platforms, however big or small they are, and our influence to inspire and challenge others to join us.
Most of all, by converging in Washington, D.C. on November 5th — all of us, all at once, from all over the country, right at the seat of power, in front of the eyes of the world, in a way that is so powerful it rips the veil of legitimacy off of Trump and his regime. In a way that is so powerful that it inspires all the people who are scared right now, all the people who are intimidated right now, all the people who are up at night, who are anguished.”
We are tens of millions across this country to rise with us, to come to D.C. after us, to rise in their small town. In a way that is so powerful that we interact with the divisions at the top. As we say in this call: We come back stronger day after day. We use every attack on us to expose the bankruptcy of this regime, its cruelty and the horror of giving them the future, every attack, to rally more people to our side. We unite and don’t divide across differences, many viewpoints and backgrounds. We foster a collective spirit of courage and righteous fury and a willingness to sacrifice for the greater good of defeating this fascism.
This is what we have to kick off November 5th in Washington, D.C. Don’t underestimate the power of the people, but only if we rise up and converge. We have to go out there and lead people to do that. This brings me to a very crucial part of this call. I’m going through the whole thing because this is a tool. I want us to understand it and appreciate it. It says: “The Trump fascist regime is illegitimate. What it is demanding we become, what it is forcing us to tolerate and make peace with, if we stay silent, is unconscionable. At every level of society, in every institution, tens of millions of us know this in our bones.”
This is important, this quote I just read, because it reminds us that we are the majority. It says Trump is illegitimate. This is a point a lot of good people get tripped up on. A lot of people say: But Trump was elected, doesn’t that make him legitimate? No, it does not. First of all, fascism is never legitimate. Second of all. Well, even if you grant Trump some claim to legitimacy because he was elected, Trump surrendered even that claim to legitimacy the minute he started using his constitutionally obtained power to systematically dismantle his constitutional order. It is illegitimate. He’s dismantling the Constitution.
It’s a lot like what Hitler did. Hitler came to power through legitimate means, and then he used his power to dismantle that constitutional order to great horror. No one, no decent person, would argue that Hitler was legitimate, and no one should argue that this regime is legitimate either. This quote I just read, also note that there are divisions at every level of society and within every institution. This is important in society, but it’s also important to recognize there are divisions within every institution within the ruling structures of this state and this government. There are forces who hate what Trump is doing. They may have a different outlook. I know they have a different outlook than me. I’m a revolutionary communist. They believe in this system. But from their own perspective, they see Trump violating and dismantling the system and the norms they believe in and have served and that they believe make this country great.
There are people at every level who oppose what Trump is doing. On their own, they will not oust this regime. They won’t risk the upheaval. They may not even have the strength. But if there was a kind of political earthquake from below, the massive, nonviolent rising that we are calling for, and we must bring forward, this can interact with those divisions at the top and compel those at the top to move in ways that they won’t without this, and give them cover to do so, so that we could create the kind of realignment and shifts within the halls of power that Trump is actually removed.
This is important. We can do this now. Trump has not yet purged everybody who could do this, who opposes him. He’s moving quickly to do it, but they’re not gone yet. This is why we’re in a race against time, and we have to act November 5th. Nothing else — and this is scientifically true, and if you don’t believe it, we should get into it in the Q and A — there is nothing else, no program, no vision that measures up to the demand before us at this moment in history. So this brings us back to the very immediate problem that we all face. November 5th and this mass mobilization is the way to defeat this fascism.
It is the way to set in motion the dynamic to drive this regime from power. Yet almost nobody who needs to know about it knows about it. It is up to us here in this room, in this organizing meeting today and in other mass meetings happening around the country to come together and make the plans that change this — starting tonight, starting today, starting tomorrow, starting this week. This has to snowball. How are we going to do this? I want to identify four things. First of all, our number one tool in mobilizing the tens of millions we need to reach is this call that I’ve been reading from. If you study this call, you have the understanding you need to go out and fight for this mission.
It has the stakes of what we face, and it breaks down what it will take to win. The stakes and what it will take. These are the two arguments we need to make with everybody. If we spread this call hand to hand by the hundreds of thousands, we can reach and move millions. It makes the argument. So today we need to develop plans to spread this call. This definitely means spreading it to the people you know in your life, your family, your neighbor, your relatives, your friends. But it means more than that. It means we need to make plans together for how we get this out in truly massive numbers — at sporting events and concerts, at transit hubs, at campuses, everywhere that people gather.
We need to make a scene of it. We need to go out together. We need to recruit our family and friends and strangers who say, give us a thumbs up. We need to recruit them to join us in getting this out by the thousands and tens of thousands, and turning others into organizers for this on the spot. We need banner drops. We need nonviolent, disruptive actions that get this in the news and that put November 5th on the map and get everybody debating: Are you going? Will it… does it have a chance of working? Is it worth it? This needs to become a mass question, quickly, that’s number one.
Number two — and I’m so glad that Juan Jose spoke to this — we need to take this call for November 5th out to every organization across this country and across the city. We need to bring them into this and win them to take this up as their own. We need to conquer every attempt to divide and conquer us, and we need to learn to work together across our divides in these different organizations and movements.
Earlier, I quoted from the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian, because, in addition to the fact that he is the architect of a whole new vision of human emancipation, he is one of the foremost analysts and people who understand the fascism and the rise of the fascism we’re facing, and how we can defeat it. I encourage you to read the work he’s done on this at Revcom.us and at Substack.BobAvakianOfficial.com.
But you don’t have to agree with me and my politics. You don’t have to agree with Bob Avakian to be in this November 5th movement. Bring your own politics into it. Bring your own vision into it. Bring your own literature and understanding into it, and let’s learn to work together, because there is no way we’re going to win without all of us aligned against this fascism. Part of this working with other organizations, we need to throw all in to make No Kings Day Two on October 18th even more massive than the first. The first had 5 million people. It gave people heart everywhere.
It should be 20 million this year, and then we need to springboard off of that to get growing momentum. As Juan Jose said, towards November 5 in D.C. Refuse Fascism has endorsed No Kings Day. We haven’t heard back yet from Indivisible and the other organizers, but we need to get out to the base of No Kings Day and Indivisible. We need to reach their chapters and their membership and the leaders of that group. As we are reaching out to them, the leaders need to be hearing from their members as well: Why aren’t you taking up November 5? We should all be doing both, and people here should go to your organizations and work with us to reach as many of them as we can.
This is not “our” thing. I’m not telling you you get these other groups to take up November 5 to build our protest. This is not a proprietary thing. This is not about whose protest is bigger. This is about the future of humanity. There is way too much proprietariness in the movements. There’s way too much divides in the movements. There’s way too much petty competition. We need to rise above that and remember why we got in the struggle in the first place. It’s to change things for the better. Those who’ve never been in the struggle, why you’re joining it now.
We can do this, and all of us need to do this together. So the second big thing is to go to other organized groups, to get them to take up November 5th as we join together, and get them to take up No Kings Day as well. The third thing — and we’re going to take these up in the organizing part of today’s meeting — is that November 5th is gonna take massive amounts of funds. Doing something on this scale — the travel, the promotion, the logistics, all of it, the volunteers, all of it — is gonna take tremendous amounts of funds. So everybody here needs to be part of fundraising. That means donate everything you can today and going forward. It means raise money. We need thousands of small donations that add up — shaking the can every time we go out, asking people to give.
We need to go to people and fight to get with people who can give seriously, major donations. Some of you in this room may know some people. Let’s talk about how we get to them. We need an organizing center in D.C. We need a national office with staff who can volunteer full time. We need millions and millions of posters and calls and billboards and other ways that the word is getting out. We need online ads. We need promotion. We need transportation and so much more. This takes money, so we need to raise money. Finally, the fourth thing that I want to mention, that all of us need to do is, if you can, if there’s any way you can do so, unless something major, insurmountable is preventing you, you need to make your plans today to get to D.C. on November 5, and you need to work to bring thousands and tens of thousands more from the West Coast.
Yes, this is a big trip. Yes, this will be a disruption to your plans and your life. But we are facing fascism. Lives are being disrupted. Lives are being shattered more by the day. As it says in our call: “We need to do this, because if we dare, we can defeat a horror that threatens humanity’s very survival. But if we fail to even try, future generations, if they even exist, will never forgive us.” So I want to challenge every single one of you who had the courage and the conscience to show up in the room today to follow that through, and to sit with the truth of what we’ve been talking about, what is described in this call — the truth of what is actually happening and where it is headed if we do not change everything.
Not every generation lives through times as consequential, as momentous as these. What we are called on to do right now is nonviolent. I want to be very clear about that. But what we are facing is no less consequential than what people faced during the Civil War and the epic battle to abolish slavery. What we are facing right now is no less consequential than what those people in Nazi Germany faced in the 1930s as Hitler rose. We look back at these and other historic turning points, and we judge how people acted or failed to act, just as future generations, if they exist, will look back and judge us.
So each of us has to ask: How will we measure up? This is a question that each of us must answer, not just with good intentions, not just with private desires, but with courage that is shown to the world, with demonstrable action that is taken together with others, and with a determination to rise to the challenge of the only thing that stands a chance of prevailing: millions and millions of us in a truly massive, historic, nonviolent outpouring in D.C. November 5, demanding the fall of the Trump fascist regime. Some of you here today can devote yourself to this full time, and you should. Free yourself up, change your plans, rearrange your life, give your all. Some of you really can’t do that right now, but you can, and you need to, look again at what you do every day, and figure out how you can give all you can to this effort.
This includes your time. It includes your resources. It includes your talents and skills. It includes your networks and your commitment to a better world, and however you choose to throw in. I want you to know that contributing everything you can, every day you can, for the next seven weeks between now and November 5th, is the biggest thing, the most meaningful thing that you can do, probably in your life, up till now, to contribute to the future of humanity, the future of generations here and all over the world. So don’t hold back.
I want to end this talk the way this call has ended with the final words, and I want you to take them to heart. It says: “History is filled with examples where people who had right on their side fought against tremendous odds and were victorious. It is also full of examples of people who passively hoped to wait it out, only to get swallowed up by a horror beyond what they ever imagined. The future is unwritten. Which one we get is up to us.”
Sam Goldman 52:00
Come one. Come all. You are needed for the biggest non violent but determined mobilization in U.S. history. November 5th, Washington, D.C., to demand Trump Must Go Now! Join a Trump Must Go Now mass organizing meeting. You will learn about the plan, you’ll hear and discuss why this is our only chance to win, and you’ll be able to contribute your efforts, talents and ideas to making this happen.
This Tuesday, September 30, in New York City, come on out. Join Sunsara Taylor along with Britta Filter, Jim Keady, Corey Teague, the Resistance Revival Chorus, and Reverend Nathaniel St. Pierre for the New York City mass organizing meeting. It’s gonna be at the Brooklyn Friends Meeting House again on Tuesday, September 30. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. You can get the address and more in the show notes and at RefuseFascism.org. If you’re in L.A., join us. Saturday, October 4, at 4:00 p.m. at 5426 Crenshaw Boulevard. If you’re in Chicago, join Sunsara Taylor and others, Sunday, October, 5 at 3:00 p.m. at Saint Pius V church, 1919, South Ashland Avenue. For more information and to register for any of these events, visit RefuseFascism.org or see the show notes.
Sam Goldman 53:25
Thanks for listening to Refuse Fascism. Please share this episode, rate and review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen, and drop a comment on our socials or YouTube. Every share helps build this fight. Become a patron to keep this podcast going and growing. Join us today at Patreon.com/RefuseFascism. Follow us on social media @RefuseFascism, including on Bluesky, and on TikTok @RefuseFashizm, F-A-S-H-I-Z-M. Thanks to Mark Tinkleman, Richie Marini and Lina Thorne for producing the show. Until next time, In the Name of Humanity, We refuse to Accept a Fascist America.