Episode 261
This week we’re sharing highlights from the organizing webinar last week that kicked off the push towards the Nov 5 mobilization.
- Watch the full August 28 Organizing Webinar: The time has come for the fall of the Trump Fascist Regime
- Call for the 5th & organizing resources
- Commit to be in DC
- New Neil Young song: Big Crime “got to get the fascists out”
Continue to take part in protests near you and connect with the movement at RefuseFascism.org. Text NOTRUMP to 855-755-1314, follow @RefuseFascism on social media (@RefuseFashizm on TikTok) and our YouTube channel: @Refuse_Fascism. Support:
- patreon.com/refusefascism
- donate.refusefascism.org
- Venmo: Refuse-Fascism
- Buy merch
Music for this episode: Penny the Snitch by Ikebe Shakedown
Episode 261 Nov 5 – Drive the Trump Regime from Power
Mon, Sep 01, 2025 12:02PM • 1:14:53
Sam Goldman 00:23
Welcome to episode 261 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and the host of the show. Refuse Fascism works to unite all who can be united to join in mass nonviolent protest and resistance in the streets and throughout society, growing to include millions, and refusing to stop until we create such a profound political crisis that Trump cannot impose his fascist program or even maintain his hold on power.
Today, we’re sharing Sunsara Taylor’s presentation, The Time Has Come for the Fall of the Trump Fascist Regime, a segment from me on taking action now to build for November 5, and some answers to questions that have been frequently asked — one might call them frequently asked questions. All of this is from our August 28 webinar, which you can watch in full, see all the organizing kits and resources available — it is linked in the show notes.
But first, a big thank you to everyone who rates and reviews the show. It really helps us reach more people to Refuse Fascism. Here’s one from this past week posted on Apple podcast from Filted Yodeo, who titled their review Lost and Found, gave us five stars — Thank you very much — and wrote: “If you are looking for direction and leadership in these troubling times, look no further than Refuse Fascism. Refuse Fascism is the only podcast I have found that truly recognizes this moment for the crisis that it is and is rising to meet it.” It means a lot, Filted Yodeo, so thank you for writing it, and we encourage you to be like them. After listening to this episode, rate and review us on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen.
Defiance and non-compliance is needed in many forms and from many voices. One voice is Neil Young and his new song Big Crime. It is truly a gift, and is the anthem we need to be singing when we flood D.C. on November 5. More artists need to follow his lead. Go listen to the full song linked in the show notes. We can’t play it, but I will read you a couple lines. “Don’t need no fascist rules. Don’t want no fascist schools. Don’t want soldiers on our street. There’s big crime in D.C. at the White House. There’s big crime in D.C. at the White House. Got to get the fascist out. Got to clean the White House out. Don’t want soldiers on our street. There’s big crime in D.C. at the White House. There’s big crime in D.C. at the White House.”
Again, that’s from Neil Young’s new song linked in the show notes. That’s one voice. That’s one form…Some more: A veteran telling troops they don’t have to obey fascist orders, a flag set ablaze at the White House, a mayor refusing to back down in the face of Trump’s fascist power grab. Let’s go! Let’s listen to those voices. Jolly Good Ginger, J. Carey and Chicago’s Mayor Brandon Johnson, back to back in that order.
Lucha 03:20
Okay, so we’re here at the sit in that Jolly Good Ginger is doing with the vets here at Union Station. We’ve got Union Station behind us here. And so why don’t you tell us what you’re doing here, what you’ve called for, and why and what’s happening.
Jolly Good Ginger 03:32
We put a call to action out for veterans. This is not — t’s completely apolitical. This shouldn’t even be Republican/Democrat issue. Any veteran who understands the oath that we took should understand that putting military in the streets of D.C. or any other city is an occupation. You’re occupying our streets with our taxpayer dollars. So we’re calling for all veterans come here stand up against this type of tyranny, this type of occupation.
As veterans, we’re going around and we’re talking to National Guard, and we’re asking them to remember their oaths, think about the orders they’re given. We’re giving them education on what they’re doing, what they’re a part of. We’re informing them of numbers they can call in. We’re encouraging them to call that number and think about what they’re a part of. More importantly, we’re encouraging them to go home, don’t do this. And we’re also, while we’re here, we’re trying to work with other organizations that are already working in D.C. to help the community, to help those unhoused that’s been terrorized by this federalization.
We’re also doing foot patrols and trying to intervene and interrupt at ICE and MPD checkpoints and keep the community safe. So mobilization of veterans right here in D.C. with a 24 hour presence, it’s a shift. We’re working in shifts. If you can’t be here all day, come for five hours. We started off with seven veterans. We’re over 50 now, and we’re hoping by the weekend, to be over 100 by next week, be 200. We’re growing, we’re growing. We plan on putting this in Chicago and New York and Baltimore and anywhere else that he plans to put the National Guard.
We want to be there. We’re calling on veterans, and calling on active duty and National Guard to remember your oath. [Lucha: Is there anything else you want to say about how people can contribute to this effort?] You can go to RememberYourOath.org. Right now, we’ve shut donations off while we get things set up with the attorney and the treasurer and that kind of stuff, but you can register to support us. If you’re a veteran, family of a veteran, or even a supporter of veterans. We need as many people out here as possible. If you’re a veteran or you support veterans, come join us. [Lucha: Thank you so much.] Thank you.
Jay Carey 05:28
I’m burning this flag as a protest to that illegal fascist president that sits in that house!
Jolly Good Ginger 05:36
The Secret Service is currently detaining Jay Carey. He is a 20 year Army veteran, combat veteran who just burnt a flag in front of the White House in protest of Donald Trump’s executive order prohibiting the burning of flags.
Jay Carey 05:49
My name is Jay Carey. I’m a retired naval combat veteran. Served over 20 years in the United States Army. I fought for every single one of your rights to express yourself and however you feel that you may want to express yourself. There’s a First Amendment right to burn the American flag. The orange Jesus in that house, right there, signed an executive order saying it is illegal to burn the American flag. No president can make a law, period. No Congress shall make a law infringing on First Amendment rights. I’m burning this flag as a protest to that illegal fascist president that sits in that house — doing it for every single one of you American citizens. We burn this flag in protest to that President who feels that it’s his right to do whatever he wants, make whatever law he wants… That President Trump put forward today, according to that executive order, I could be in prison right now for over one year. [other voice] It’s violation of his first amendment rights.
Reporter 1 06:50
All of this pushback against Trump, knowing how he responds to that, could actually provoke him to follow through with this talk about sending in the National Guard, when yesterday, he seemed to waffle. Could this make things worse, all this pushback?
Mayor Johnson 07:03
Could you imagine if, as a descendant of slaves, if my ancestors would have had that same rationale: Let’s not fight against the Confederacy; Let’s just try to get along, and then maybe one day, they’ll give us our freedom? Nowhere in the history of America or the world where marginalized people have sat silent and idle and they’ve been able to actually achieve justice and liberation. The fact that you have a unified front in Chicago, where we are rejecting the occupation by the military of our cities, that’s actually fighting for our democracy, that’s what’s required in this moment. Leading in this moment takes a great deal of courage, but we stand on the shoulders of so many people that have come before us. We have seen these type of tyrannical acts before. One thing that we know for sure, when we fight back against tyranny, The people united always prevail.
Sam Goldman 07:47
With that here is Sunsara Taylor, the co-initiator and national leader of RefuseFascism.org It’s a pleasure for me to introduce Sunsara Taylor, Sunsara is a co-initiator of Refuse Fascism and a national leader of Refuse Fascism, and she’s also the co host of The RNL Show, Revolution Nothing Less Show, which airs on Thursdays on Youtube. Welcome, Sunsara.
Sunsara Taylor 08:10
Hi, Thank you, Sam, and thank you to everybody who is tuning in. I’m really happy to be with you in this extremely momentous time. What I’m going to do is I’m going to lay out what it is that we are initiating/calling for, the stakes of this, what we face, and how we’re going to accomplish it. It’s gonna be substantive, I’m gonna go through some things, and then we’ll have time for an organizing presentation, the nuts and bolts, concretely, what you need to start doing, and then we’ll have some question and answer as Sam opened up.
The time has come for the fall of the Trump fascist regime. Beginning November 5, 2025, the one year anniversary of Trump’s election, millions and millions of us descend on Washington, D.C. in the biggest non violent, but determined mass mobilization in U.S. history, not stopping until this fascist regime — the Trump fascist regime — has been driven from power. This is humanity’s only hope for a decent future. Why is that the case? It’s because Fascism is not a looming threat. It is upon us now. What do I mean by fascism? I want to take the example of someone that most of you have probably heard of and probably been agonized about, what’s been done to him, Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
I want to start with him. This is someone who grew up in El Salvador. He fled his home country fear for his life. He came to this country after years of struggle. He won a court order protection against deportation back to El Salvador because he had legitimate fear for his life and persecution. So he was protected by court order never to be deported back to El Salvador. He was swept up by Trump. Trump said he’s gonna… one of the things he wants to do is the biggest mass deportation in American history. So he started his machinery of deportation. He said, all these criminals, all these, you know, disease, trodden people, foreigners, invaders, rapists, murderers, criminals.
We’re gonna round them up. But that was a lie. The majority, overwhelming majority, of immigrants in this country are law abiding. They are less criminal than the average American born population. So what did Trump have to do to follow through on this? He had to start sweeping up indiscriminately, and he has his masked men coming, terrorizing communities, driving people into the shadows, having them locked in their homes, afraid to leave, to go to the store, to go to work, to go to school, any of this. Kilmar Abrego Garcia gets swept up in the mass deportation machinery.
In violation of the order that he should never be sent back to El Salvador, he’s put on a plane with others to go to El Salvador, to be sent to CECOT prison, a prison notorious around the world for its brutal conditions, its human rights violations, and the fact that no one has ever gotten out of it. Mid trip to El Salvador, another court intervenes and says to the administration: It is against the law, now that I’ve ordered it, stop the planes mid flight; You had no due process; These immigrants must not be sent to El Salvador. Trump and his regime land the planes anyway. Two violations of court orders: First, he should never been sent to El Salvador.
Second, none of them should been landed by the Second Court order. This gets raised. Finally, somebody in the Trump regime itself admits that kilmar was deported by mistake; it was a clerical error. The Supreme Court of the United States says Trump should facilitate his return, and Trump says: I have no power, I can’t do anything about it — and he throws up his hands. He’s defying the Supreme Court after he defied these other courts. Finally, after international outcry and tremendous legal battles, Kilmar Abrego Garcia has returned to this country, only to face illegitimate charges once again. He goes in for an interview on his immigration status, he is kidnapped yet again, and now the regime is trying to send him to Uganda — to a country that he does not speak the language he has no ties. He shouldn’t be facing criminal charges.
He’s already been reportedly tortured and beaten in CECOT, and Trump is taking a vendetta against him. This is somebody who was just living his life. It is not about anybody’s safety. It is not about protecting the American people or the homeland. This is about instilling terror. It’s showing the entire world that the most massively repressive and powerful state in the history of the world will come down and squash you like a bug, evidence or not, rule of law or not. It’s to instill terror against all immigrants, but also against anybody who would oppose Trump.
It is not only vicious, cruel terroristic, it is in violation of making a mockery of due process and the rule of law, which is a cornerstone of fascism. It’s openly terroristic dictatorship of this system; no constraint by the rule of law, and it’s terror from below. But Trump fascism, Trump MAGA fascism, is also terror from the top down. I want you to think about just a few days ago, Trump’s FBI raided the home of John Bolton. John Bolton, former US National Security Advisor, former ambassador to the UN under Trump himself. John Bolton was part of Trump’s administration. John Bolton has been a loyal part of the U.S. apparatus of war and imperialist domination around the world. He’s carried out all kinds of, in my view, crimes of this country around the world.
Even he, Donald Trump has come after, because he criticized Trump. He called him out. He had differences over how Trump is handling things and over quite a bit of Trump’s ignorance about the world. John Bolton spoke out about this, so Trump had his home raided. Chris Christie also was once part of the the camp of friends around Trump, part of his team, criticizes this act of intimidation, and Trump the next day says: Well, maybe I’ll investigate you; I think you got away with murder. I’m not saying chris Christie never did anything wrong, John Bolton never did anything wrong.
I’m saying this is a vendetta, and it is again, intended to instill terror against the masses of people who might oppose Trump or be targeted by him, some of the classes of people that he hates and that his base of supporters hate and want to purge in this country, or somebody even within the halls of power. In addition to John Bolton and Chris Christie, Donald Trump’s thugs have assaulted, arrested and threatened Democratic mayors, Democratic governors, Democratic senators, even a Former president. Donald Trump has accused Obama of treason and had investigations opened up into his conduct. Treason carries the death penalty.
This is very, very serious. Not only is this terroristic, not only is this a violation of the way that the norms of this country have worked for nearly 150 years — since shortly after the end of the Civil War, disputes among the rulers, even fierce disputes, were settled through lawsuits, they were settled in other ways. They were not settled by weaponizing and treating the Justice Department and the FBI and the repressive apparatus of the state as a vendetta machine. This going after Trump’s Democratic rivals and even Republican rivals who don’t march in lockstep with his fascism, is both necessary on his part to clear the way within the government of any force that would oppose his fascist program — you think about during the 2020 beautiful uprising against the police murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, when Donald Trump wanted to ask his generals to shoot protesters in the legs, and the general said: No — Trump is trying to get rid of anybody within any of the institutions who will tell him no.
They did thwart a lot of his program, legitimately, because his program is illegitimate, and Trump won, and he’s purging them. So he has to have a vendetta. It’s not just his personal vindictiveness, although that’s part of it, but it’s necessary to clear the way of any obstacles within the machinery of the state for his full fascist program, and it’s to clear the way for even greater atrocities against the masses of people. Because, as Senator Padilla said, after he was brutally assaulted for simply asking a question of Kristi Noem when she was saying how the military had been deployed to Los Angeles, explicitly to overturn democratic elections in California, and Padilla spoke up and challenged this, and he was tackled and detained, and he said: If they will do this to me, a sitting U.S. Senator, think what they will do to the cook and the dishwasher and the day laborer at Home Depot.
Indeed, we don’t have to imagine. We have seen the brutality play out, and we have seen the images and the reports from Alligator Alcatraz with people being forced to eat rotten food in airless, suffocating, overheated cages, without medical care, without due process. And this is just the beginning. If this regime is not stopped, if this regime is not driven from power soon, which is the only way to get it to stop, all of this that I’m describing will look like child’s play; it will look quaint. What is coming, if this regime is not stopped, is beyond what most people can even yet imagine, and we are only getting a taste of it.
As horrific as what we are seeing is as horrific as the military occupation of D.C. and before it, Los Angeles, and now the threats against other cities; as horrific as the disappearances have been; as horrific as the women dying of lack of abortion care has been, and the suffocated enslaved lives for the ten of thousands of women and girls who’ve been forced to give birth against their will because they have no access to abortion — as horrific as that is — as horrific as the bullying and the erasure of trans people is already, we have only seen just the beginning. I want to take note of a particular pattern that goes along with all of this. When Trump is taking vengeance and sending his thugs against, and deploying military against, Democratic cities and governors and and this sort of thing, he is taking within this special vengeance on Black political figures, and he is unleashing white supremacist genocidal brutality against Black youth in particular.
It should be lost on nobody. I posted a picture of the image that Donald Trump tweeted of Obama, I’ll describe it in a moment, I posted it on Instagram, and a bunch of people wrote in the comments: That’s not a real picture, as if I was exaggerating what Trump has done. But it’s not a real picture, I’ll describe it, but it’s a picture that Trump posted. What was this picture? If you didn’t see it, it was an AI generated image of Obama being tackled by federal agents, shoved to the ground and cuffed, perp walked, and put behind bars, and in a jumpsuit.
There was the imagery of vengeance against his any of Trump’s rivals, but there was a particular vendetta against a Black man; a Black man who rose to President, but a black man at all, who belongs, in Trump’s view, in prison. This has been a characteristic, a hallmark of Trump for most of his life. He has, going back to his racist discrimination in real estate, but also his taking out full page ads to demand the death penalty for the Central Park Five. If you don’t know about that case, you have to look it up. They were innocent, young, Black and Latino teenagers who were railroaded and Donald Trump said it wasn’t enough that they’d be in prison and incarcerated wrongly for stealing decades of their youth and their lives, but he said: Bring back the death penalty.
He put his own money into full page ads saying: Bring back the death penalty — wanting these children killed. This is a hallmark of Trump. Even after they got out and they were vindicated, Donald Trump said in his first term, they should still be in prison, even though they had been legally cleared of all charges. So Donald Trump, when he’s unleashing his military in these Democratic run cities, he has a particular vengeance against the Black youth, in addition to the immigrants. That’s who Trump is talking about. When he did the press conference with the National Guard and the FBI and the police in D.C., and he said, knock the hell out of ’em — those were his words: Knock the hell out of ’em — Trump is openly calling for police brutality and abuse.
As I said, he’s been doing it for a lifetime. He also came out and publicly said in Chicago that shoplifters — and everybody knew from the context of his speech he was talking about Black people in particular, shoplifters — should be shot on sight. Not put on trial, not elevate the penalties after a trial, shot on site. This is what he is green lighting. Let’s be clear, millions and millions of Black people already have had their lives destroyed and crushed by the massive epidemic of police terror, brutality and mass incarceration in this country. It has crushed millions and millions of lives. But this is not enough for Trump. He wants to put this on steroids. He has talked about deporting “homegrowns” to places like El Salvador and elsewhere.
Well, who do you think he’s talking about? He’s talking about dissidents. He’s talking about his opponents, disappearing them forever. And he is talking about immigrants, definitely brown skinned people, whether they have papers or not, and he is definitely talking about Black people. Why else do you think he and that white supremacist idiot sidekick Pete “pig’s-breath” [Hegseth] is fighting so hard to bring back the Confederate monuments, and to rename military bases after Confederate generals, and to cast U.S. chattel slavery as not that bad?; U.S. Chattel slavery, an institution where Black people were branded with hot irons and whipped like beasts, where they were forced to work from can’t see in the morning to can’t see at night, where they were raped and raped and raped again and then forced to have their children ripped from their arms and sold away at a profit to some plantation owner, and they were denied the right to read, and they were punished if they learned to read.
This was not so bad, in Trump’s view. You don’t say that’s not so bad if you’re not intending to bring that kind of thing back. Maybe not in that exact form, but maybe not that different. This is really a genocidal, white supremacist fascist program. And I want to underscore we have only seen the beginning, and even this is not the full picture. I want to add to this that Trump is assaulting science and medicine. It’s important that we confront this, because on one level, everybody knows Trump is an asshole. Everybody knows he’s doing things wrong.
Every decent person knows. I know there’s the Trump supporters, but I’m talking about the over half this country that’s decent. People know this, but they have not confronted it fully, and in some levels, they’re in denial, and in many ways, they are being denied. It’s hard to keep up with how fast things are moving. So it’s important that we keep up and we confront people with this, because if people don’t understand what we’re facing, they’re not going to act in the ways that are necessary. If you don’t understand you’re about to die from cancer, you’re not gonna go through chemo because it is not fun. You’d rather go to the beach. You’d rather live your life.
If you don’t understand how bad the disease is, the treatment… and we’re talking about a non violent, massive movement, but we are talking about people standing up and sacrificing and doing it together in a massive way before it is too late. So we have to confront what we’re really up against. I want to add to this, Trump’s assault on science and medicine. Trump put a science denying lunatic in charge of the Center for Disease Control. RFK Jr. is a man — and I don’t judge people from what for what they do as young people if they grow out of it, you look at somebody’s arc of their life — but [R]FK Jr. has continued in this.
As a kid, they say that he would have his friends come over and he put live baby birds in a blender and turn it on for amusement, just to watch them be shocked. And he’s continued like this, sawing the head off a whale. This guy is a lunatic, and he’s a science denier. He’s a vaccine denier. He spreads conspiracy theories. He has come in and taken a sledgehammer to the institution in this country — to science itself, to humanity’s store of knowledge, but also to the institution — that is charged with public health. He fired the whole panel of people in charge of the mRNA vaccine.
Scientists have come out and said this is guaranteeing, not only that we won’t develop vaccines for new, unexpected, newly emergent pandemics, but it is guaranteeing many millions of people will die in the next flu pandemic that hits the globe. It is known. We know this now. This is murderous, what’s happening. It is murderous. I want to shout out today, the scientists at the CDC who walked out in protest after RFK tried to force out the Director of the CDC, and I want to shout out Susan Monarez, the director, for refusing to resign, and fighting; and staying and fighting. And one of the things we need, and I’ll mention this in a minute, is we need people to stop submitting to Donald Trump’s fascist orders and extortion within the institutions.
It’s not enough to just resign in protest and speak out. People need to stay, and they need to fight against the fascist imposition and remaking of these institutions. So it’s very important these scientists walked out. This is unprecedented, what’s being done. It’s unprecedented to see the scientists walk out, and that is telling you how life and death this is. But it’s in every realm. It’s Trump’s moves to subjugate the arts, to take over the Kennedy Center, and far beyond that; to subjugate the arts to fascist conformity and cruelty. It’s his acceleration of climate destruction, his defunding and his acceleration of fossil fuels, including in the international arena, undermining renewables. This is accelerating an existential death sentence for all of humanity and many other species.
It is Trump’s full throated backing of the howling moral crime that is the genocide in Gaza, with his twisted Glee about turning that land into beachfront property in a casino for the wealthy. All of this and more that we don’t have time to go into, all of this is something that every decent person needs to understand and confront. There is no living with this fascism. I see these tutorials, you’ve probably seen them too: Ten things to do to survive fascism; Here’s the tip for how we get through this authoritarianism together — Here’s the answer: There is no getting through this. There are no tips to survive this.
There are many, many forms of resistance that are needed, but we need to have them all aiming at and building towards, defeating this fascism, unseating this regime, driving it from power. Yes, nonviolently, but driving it from power. Because as long as it’s in power, it will barrel ahead. It will absorb different acts of resistance, and it will move on more fronts than the people can possibly keep up with. It’s been heroic to see the people defending the rights and lives of immigrants that are illegitimately under attack and being assaulted by ice. We need tens of thousands of people. When ICE shows up, it shouldn’t be a dozen, it shouldn’t be a hundred, it should be thousands.
But let’s be honest, most people have been deported, and most people have been driven into terror, to hiding, and many, over a million, I’ve seen reports of a million and a half, have already self deported. Unless and until this regime is driven out, unseated, removed from power, there is no living with this. It will only get far worse, and the horrors will go beyond what you can even imagine right now. Anybody looking back with historic perspective is not going to say: Oh, they couldn’t have seen it coming. The writing is on the wall, and Trump is rubbing our faces in it every day. Every compromise with this regime, every accommodation made by any institution or individual, even in the name of preserving some funding or some research or some ability to do some good for some people, only fuels Trump’s demand for even more slavish submission.
Every capitulation by universities, law firms, other agencies, only feeds this regime’s ravenous hunger to remake all of society in its grotesque image. We are facing fascism. This is a different form of brutal rule. It cannot be lived with. It must be defeated. It must be driven from power. And time is running out to do so. This is why we need the biggest outpouring in all of U.S. history, on Washington, D.C., November 5, and that’s just a start. It needs to be sustained, not a one day thing, nonviolent, but determined, and such numbers that this regime, it creates the kind of political crisis where we can set in motion, driving this regime from power. I want to underscore, it needs to be November 5. It can’t be later. It has to be soon.
The elections… a lot of people say — I’ve heard this said too by a lot of decent people: We need to make a lot of noise, we need to protest, we need to be out there for the next year in order to slow this down until the midterm elections — No. First of all, Trump is accelerating. We are not slowing him down. We are getting creamed right now. We don’t have to be. There’s tens of millions of us. We could win this battle. But right now, we are not winning it. We have to be real. We’re not slowing it down, he’s accelerating. Number two, anybody who is sane has to confront that there is no sane reason to expect Donald Trump to respect an election he loses.
This is a tyrant who instigated the January 6 insurrectionists and then he pardoned them. He’s already tried to steal an election, even Gavin Newsom was talking about this, this is right out there. And he’s already openly rigging the next election. Yes, I’m talking about the open calls for gerrymandering, so that he can have illegitimately Republican, fascist representation in the midterms, but I’m also talking about the mobilization of the National Guard from all these red states — overwhelmingly Confederate States, by no coincidence — into the blue cities.
I think we have to ban this word that the pundits and way too many politicians are using to describe the occupation of D.C., they say it’s “performative.” [mocking tone] All these troops are there, they’re not really doing anything, they’re hanging out in front of Union Station, posing for pictures; It’s performative; It’s just Trump’s ego. No. It is setting precedent. It doesn’t take the most imaginative person to imagine these troops stationed in the concentrated blue cities, in Detroit, in Philadelphia and other places in the swing states, stationed like this, troops who’ve been told to knock the hell out of them, troops who’ve been recruited, as they are doing, from among the most racist and vigilante militia types in this country, Proud Boy types, who don’t have badges, and who are stationed around the election polling booths.
You think that won’t suppress Black votes and Latino votes? You think that won’t help him rig the elections? Or if he starts to count them and thinks he’s losing, they can’t create a pretext where they can throw out the elections? They are not going to accept an election they lose. So not only, the elections are way too late, it is delusional, dangerous, and throwing away humanity’s future to rely on that. This regime must be driven from power — again, nonviolently, but driven from power by the tens of millions of decent people in this country. I’m gonna talk about how we do that, but I want to address one objection that we hear people say: But Trump was legitimately elected, you can’t really drive him out, it doesn’t seem legitimate; Isn’t he legitimate, even if you don’t like him?; He was elected.
I want to say there’s nothing legitimate about Donald Trump. We have to dispel this completely. First of all, fascism is never legitimate. All the atrocities, all the crimes we’ve seen him commit, all of the greater crimes that we know he will commit if he’s allowed to stay in power, none of that can be legitimated because he won an election. That’s just a dividing line in human history. But even if you were to accept that somehow being elected gave him some kind of legitimacy on the terms of this system, he surrendered any semblance of legitimacy, even on those terms, the moment he started to use his constitutionally obtained power to dismantle and take a sledgehammer to the constitutional order. This is what we have to understand.
There’s nothing legitimate in that. He is dismantling the very source that, even of that claimed legitimacy. He is undermining the rule of law, he is undermining the separation of powers, he has turned the Supreme Court illegitimately into an instrument of fascist atrocity, and it is green lighting his crimes. It is aiding and abetting him and violating and systematically ignoring the U.S. Constitution, and he’s done things that are openly unconstitutional. And he’s been given sanction by the court. Just the other day, he said, by executive order, he wants to give a year prison time to anybody who burns the flag. That’s not a power he constitutionally has.
The Supreme Court upheld that right; Texas v Johnson, 1984 a very dear friend of mine who burned that flag and has spoken out about it on the Revolution Nothing Less Show — we’re gonna be broadcasting it his interview. I’m very proud of the veterans who went immediately in D.C., in front of the White House, and burnt the flag in defiance of that. But this is just one of many examples any claim that legitimacy this man might have had, he surrendered, and his regime has surrendered by dismantling this constitutional order. So again, and I keep coming back to this, the regime must be driven from power. Tens of millions of us, non violently converging on Washington, D.C., November 5, the anniversary of his re-election, and not stopping until he is gone from power.
So is this realistic and how could this really work? Could we, through our massive mobilization… first of all, could we mobilize the biggest protest in human history, and can we sustain it, so it’s not just one day, but it’s again and again, creating an international incident, clogging up all of D.C., building a small city of protest that does not relent? — Some people coming and going, sometimes they’ll swell and sometimes it’ll shrink, but it continues, and new people come in, and restaurants are donating food, and people are donating transportation, and people are figuring out how to work together, and there’s volunteers medical workers, who are coming in and setting up tents and providing services where they’re needed, there’s people who are doing trainings for defense and patrols to keep it nonviolent, but also keep it protected.
There’s all kinds of people coming in and lending their expertise; A lot of the veterans who are protesting now the way the troops are being misused, some of them could play a big role in this; Many others with their skills coming in; Musicians coming and playing; Making this an international spectacle, but not a spectacle, a real, determined resistance that inspires the world and creates the level of political crisis in this country that Donald Trump cannot govern this country, cannot impose his fascist program and cannot even hold onto the reins of power?
First of all, is it realistic that we could get these people? Somebody asked me this this morning. A lot of people ask this. They say: Well, you really think you could get the American people to do that? You really think people are more willing to protest than they were before, and this is more likely now? I’m gonna be very honest, the odds are very long. Overwhelmingly, there’s tens of millions of people who care deeply. There’s more of us than there are of the fascists. But overwhelmingly, people are in denial. They get it partly, but they’re not confronting the full picture, and they’re finding a way to live with this. Yes, protest springs up with each new outrage, but overall, the protests have been shrinking. That’s not a fault of our bad organizing, or somebody else’s bad organizing, or this group or that group. That’s because… you think about it, June 14, no Kings Day, there was over 5 million people in the streets. We haven’t seen anything close to that. It’s been smaller and smaller.
The fundamental reason for this is that people are afraid of the stakes. If you don’t see a way that your protest is going to break through — if you protested and the regime continues to accelerate — of course, it’s the right thing to do, but a lot of people are going to choose not to. Especially when the stakes are going up. Especially when you see what they’re doing to Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Especially when you see the vindictiveness and vendetta even against very powerful ruling class figures, you think: Why am I going to stick my neck out?, everybody who does gets fired, gets investigated, gets in prison, gets disappeared; or: Maybe I should lay low. Only if we come out in the massive enough numbers that they can’t pick us off. Only if we do that, do we stand a chance.
Only if we call for something as big as what Refuse Fascism has initiated, but which everybody has to take up, which is millions and millions of us strong in D.C. Only in that way do we stand a chance to stop this regime. So only something on that scale is going to inspire people on the level that is necessary. It really is, as they say in sports, sometimes, go big or go home. Of course, everybody should do the right thing and protest and object in whatever personal way they can. But let’s be real, we have a responsibility to people of the world and to the people under the gun now and the future generations to stop this regime — not just to do the right thing, to stop it, to defeat it, to drive it from power, nonviolently.
So that’s where we have to aim. I believe, and those of us who initiated this call believe, that only if we call for that do we have a chance of inspiring and winning people to the biggest mobilization in U.S. history. So yes, I think it’s possible. No, I don’t think it’s the most likely — I’m gonna be real — but it is the only thing that measures up. It is the only hope humanity has, and it is what we have to fight for, and it is possible. It is not a Hail Mary pass. It is not just a desperate move that we’re so far down that it will just do anything and hope it works. There is a profound material basis in the fact that there are tens of millions who hate this, and they exist at every level of society and in every institution. So could it work? Yes, it could.
The reason it could work, I want to go back to Donald Trump threatening Barack Obama, John Bolton, generals, members of the Fed people in the CDC, purging the generals in the military — but he hasn’t fully yet — threatening the governors and the mayors of Democratic cities. I want to go back to this, because this is not only an example of the terror and the horror of the fascism and why it must be defeated, it also points to the fact that if there were a political earthquake from below — massive struggle, non violent, but relentless, among the people demanding that this regime must go now — there are still people in positions of power all the way up, and every institution, and every part of this government who are deeply opposed to this fascism — who are themselves, the targets of it, and who see what they believe, and in this country, what they believe makes this country legitimate and good, under assault by Trump.
If there was a struggle from below, it could compel them to move, but it could also give them the sense that there’s a chance; this is their chance; this is their moment to move together to find a way to remove the regime. There are all kinds of ways that Trump could legitimately be removed from power that are compelled by the nonviolent struggle from the people. But without that struggle from the people, this is not going to happen. No one is going to stick their neck out in that way on their own, and they’re not going to have the power and the force behind them, among others, to follow it through, and they’re not going to have this interest.
But if there was a struggle from below such that this country is becoming ungovernable ,and from their own interests of holding this country together and preserving its place in the world and its legitimacy, they have to remove Trump, that could be compelled. So it is possible. Again, it has to be soon — not only because the atrocities are accelerating by the day and they must be stopped, but because, for now, there are people in positions of power who could do this, but Trump is purging them systematically, and if we wait much longer that window closes, and when that window closes, it is unspeakably more difficult, if not impossible to unseat this, and the atrocities will be beyond what we’ve seen; again, what we’ve seen so far, will seem like child’s play.
So the odds are long, but the necessity is there, and the people are there, and there is no other way. Because that’s true, we can win people to see that; they can come to understand it the way we’ve come to understand it. But the only way that happens is that we, the hundreds of us on this call tonight, and those we can immediately reach, we ourselves confront these stakes and rearrange our lives accordingly, and then we go out and fight for others to do the same. I want to be very clear: There are moments in history where everything about the future depends on what we do.
We are in a time when the single biggest priority in each of our lives, and the way we are going to be judged by history, by our grandchildren, if they exist, is by what we did in this moment. So right now, this needs to be our biggest priority, fighting to mobilize everybody for November 5 and beyond in this nonviolent, massive political earthquake from below that is determined to drive Trump from power. This means take time off. It means make a serious donation. It means go talk to your friends. It means make your plans now to come to D.C. It means, if you know people in D.C., arrange for housing. If you don’t know people in D.C., then be part of networks figuring this out. It means you’re going to others.
We have posters — Sam and Coco will talk about this in a minute, but — we have posters announcing the fall of the Trump fascist regime. We have a call to act, which I neglected to say at the beginning. Most of my presentation is drawing from the text of this and elaborating on it. This makes the argument. It’s on the website RefuseFascism.org — get it, internalize it, argue it out with others, hand it out. I’m not talking about the few hundred of us here. Hand out a few thousand flyers at the next protest. I’m saying, let’s get on a mission and recruit others, so we are distributing hundreds of thousands of these at farmer’s markets, at concerts, on subways and busses at the college campuses, under every dorm room in every dorm on the campus, under the professor’s doors, in the government agency offices — hand it out everywhere.
This has to be known. So make your plans to be to D.C. Free up your time and volunteer your services and skills, whatever they are. Bring in your network. Spread the flyers and the posters. Donate and fundraise. Get out to people who have influence and platforms and celebrity and disproportionate resources and make the argument to them. Or set up meetings for me and others, Coco Sam and others to meet with them and really argue for why they need to throw in. Everybody with a platform has disproportionate responsibility. There’s a lot of people, again, who care. We need to let them know, this is our chance.
This is not our thing, Refuse Fascism, this is humanity’s chance. We initiated this. We invite everybody in. It is open to all. It needs to be taken up by everybody as their own. We are prepared to go anywhere and make the argument to anybody who can be a game changer in this. So help get to those people who have disproportionate influence. Learn as you do this. Dialog with others. Unite all who can be united. I’m a communist revolutionary, I’m a follower of the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian, whose writings I highly recommend. He’s been way ahead of the curve on the rise of fascism and how it must be defeated, and on a host of other questions. Get into what he’s saying, don’t be scared away. But also bring in your own ideas. Stand together.
We need to unite — from the people who are in the ruling authorities all the way to the most radical and everybody in between — we need to have unity, because none of us want a fascist America. We need to learn to work together, so unite all who can be united. And finally, people say: But we can’t wait till November, and that’s true. People need to be rising up now. There needs to be resistance now. There needs to be refusal to comply. There needs to be mass defiance, including in the institutions. Instead of capitulation after capitulation like dominoes, people in the universities need to stand up. They need to stand up in the law firms.
They need to stand up in the government agencies, like at the CDC, and they need to demand their institutions. If they’ve capitulated, they need to reverse the capitulation, and if they haven’t, they need to stand strong. There needs to be waves of protest and resistance, but it needs to be linked to driving out the regime and converging in D.C. on November 5. Then, from there, it’s on. So I want to close the way that the call to action that we put out closes, where it says: “History is full of examples where people who had right on their side fought against tremendous odds and were victorious. It is also filled with examples where people hope to wait it out, only to get swallowed by a horror beyond what they ever imagined. The future is unwritten. Which one we get is up to us.” So that’s the challenge, and that’s the invitation.
Sam Goldman 43:14
Now you’ll hear how you can act on what you just heard starting now. Step one: Commit to being in D.C. starting November 5. This November 5. You can take a moment right now to commit to being in D.C. starting November 5. We need millions, millions and millions flooding D.C.. Somebody said: What’s the demand? The demand is: Trump Must Go Now! The demand is: We’re not going to stop until this fascist regime is removed from power. That’s what our goal is set on, and we’re not gonna accept anything less.
I want to talk a little bit about making and sharing your plans to be in D.C. Step one: We’re making our plans to be there. That means clear your schedule. You need to take off work, take off work. You need to arrange childcare, arrange that childcare. Talk to your family now. Talk to your neighbors, your friends, whatever arrangements you need to make. Book your ride, arrange that carpool, get your train tickets, get your bus tickets, get your plane tickets. If you’re part of a group or a network, start organizing busses, start organizing. I heard some people in L.A. talking about chartering planes.
Start looking into that now. Start fundraising, asking your friends and family to support you in making this commitment. If they can’t go, will they contribute to supporting you in getting there? Reach out to your friend that lives in D.C., your old college roommate, whoever — can you crash at their place in D.C.? Can they house others? Make arrangements to stay at a hostel. Commit to making this real. Think about it this way: The first step in getting others to be part of building for this is us making the commitment ourselves, and it starts with us making our plan to be there. I wanna let people know that we’re gonna have more resources regarding housing and transportation soon, but again, I want to encourage people, don’t wait.
If you’re someone with connections in D.C., move on those now. Get that carpool together. Get that bus together. When you sign up, you will be hearing from us. If you commit, we’re going to give you ways to get more involved and to stay updated. And, very importantly, share that you’re coming. Once you’ve made this commitment, that you will be in D.C., demanding that the whole Trump fascist regime must go now, demanding the fall of the Trump regime, starting November 5. Once you’ve done that, share it. Post it on your socials. Text Your group chat. Tell your cousin, your coworker, your neighbor, your friends, your classmates, your professors.
When people hear you are going and the steps that you’re taking to make that real, it makes it real for them. Your courage spreads. That’s how we multiply this. You know, posting a quick story: I signed up. I’m going to D.C., starting November 5. Join me! — and the link. That’s a great first step. Now, Sunsara talked a little bit about this, but I want to give you some more tools on it. We need to spread it everywhere, from the windows in businesses in our town squares and our main shopping districts, and on poles throughout cities everywhere, to plastering the walls of campuses and Metro hubs. It needs to be everywhere.
By next week, people need to be buzzing; Have you heard about these people going to D.C. starting November 5? Have you heard about people calling for the fall of the Trump regime? Have you heard about people calling to not leave until the regime is removed? Plaster the walls. Posters in every dorm, every cafe, every community center. Flyers in every big crowd, not just one to one flyering, but, like giving people stacks to get out in their community. Organizing people on the spot. We’re not gonna do it with the few hundreds we have now, but we are gonna do it by the thousands that we get this to right away, and by every person we meet, treating them as a potential organizer and giving them something to do right away, even if it’s as simple as getting a stack of stickers out all over their campus, or getting posters up on one city block.
Think about concerts, sports events, metro hubs. Strategize with your crew. Where can you saturate your area? Where are people who, if they see this, be moved to start a stir about it? Where do those people congregate? Get these posters there? Like campuses. It’s hard to imagine a movement that drives out a fascist regime without students being at the forefront. So we need to be on these campuses with these posters. We’ll talk more about where to get them in a moment. What if every bulletin board, every lamp post, every campus corner shouted: November 5! Labor Day, it’s gonna be a launch pad. Really be on a mission.
Hit the marches, the protests, the parades, with this message: The time has come for the fall of the Trump fascist regime, beginning November 5, Washington, D.C. Get enlargements of this poster, get it on cardboard polls, and bring it into these marches, into these protests. Make a banner with the information that’s on the poster, and get it up on polls and stand where everybody can see it. When people see November 5 everywhere, on every wall, every post, every bulletin board, it tells them this is real. It builds momentum and it builds urgency.
People start asking: What’s happening November 5? And that’s how we turn this into a movement. People have asked, how do we go from where we are to where we need to be? This is part of it. It’s not all of it, but it is an essential first step. We need people, you know, walking into class or work saying: I’ve seen this everywhere, what’s going on with this November 5 thing? Visual saturation is really how movements become undeniable. Every sticker that people see, every flyer, every poster, is a signal that this is something serious, that we are many, and we are coming.
When the walls of a city or a campus all say November 5, this is what creates that buzz. It sparks conversation, and it gives people the courage to step in, including — people were asking about organizations — this is part of what gives organizations to the courage to step in, because they can see with their own eyes that they won’t be standing alone. So in addition to spreading it everywhere in real life, we need to spread it everywhere, on the phone, in our conversations, online, really everywhere. You’re on Reddit, post it on Reddit, and post it all over social media.
But we can’t just post and hope, we’ve gotta talk to people. So pick up the phone. You are somebody who wants to work with organizational outreach? Call some churches — call some that are in your area. Call some some of the organizations that that you think need to be throwing in. And call everyone who signed up. If you’re part of a Refuse Fascism chapter, there are people that have signed up that are in your area. They’ve signed the call to conscience, they’ve signed up to volunteer, they’ve just signed up to be in the loop. Call those people. Ask: Do you know about November 5? Do you know that we’re calling people to flood D.C.? Have you made your plans? Have you committed to coming? Did you tell your friends? And make the case. Use the call for November 5.
There’s a half page flyer that you can use, basically as a script, the first part of it, to have those conversations. But really be sharing why you are going, why you are throwing into this. Really, phone banking and fundraising are lifelines. They turn hundreds into thousands, and part of that is how we turn those thousands into millions. And fundraising, with all we do, we can’t imagine driving out a fascist regime without raising lots and lots of funds. Fighting fascism isn’t free. So part of what we can do, part of what we must do when we’re having these conversations with, whether they be friends or family, whether they be people who’ve signed up, we need to be asking everyone to donate to make this real.
Whether they can donate $10 or $10,000. We can say things like: I’m going to D.C. to drive the Trump fascist regime from power. I’m going to be there starting November 5. I’m changing my life to be there, and I want you to chip in so that we can get 10,000 posters up. That’s concrete, and that can help move people. This is how we build the networks and infrastructure that’s foundational to what we’re trying to do. Spread the word on social media. We have a toolkit we’re gonna share with you, but really it needs to be filling, not just the walls, but social feeds with November 5 — The time has come for the fall of the fascist Trump regime. Be part of the biggest nonviolent mobilization in US history. Be there on November 5.
Come late if you must come and stay, if you can, but you need to be there. As I said, with fundraising component, the first step, similarly to the first step of getting other people to come to D.C., is us making our commitments right now to make real our plans to be there. We also have a role to play in contributing to making this real. The truth is, history is decided by what we do. It’s going to be decided by whether we flood the streets and refuse to let this fascist regime tighten its grip on the country, whether we flood the streets and bring things to a halt in D.C. until this regime is removed from power, spreading across the country from there, or if we sit back and let fascism consolidate. November 5 has to be a turning point.
Millions of people need to feel it in their bones, that something historic is coming — that there is a real plan to drive Trump out of power — that this is humanity’s only chance. That only happens if, everywhere they turn, they see November 5, the time has come for the fall of the Trump fascist regime! Beginning November 5 In Washington, D.C. Mobile billboards cutting through traffic, movie size posters on city walls, their social feeds lit up with this one message. That’s what your donation does; it transforms this from an idea into an undeniable force. So don’t sit this out. Give like the future depends on it, because it does. If you can give $20, give $20. If $50 is a stretch, give $50. If you can give $5 or $10 that makes a difference too. And let’s make November 5 impossible to ignore.
You can go to RefuseFascism.org to make your donation, or you can text support to 855-755-1314. I want to thank everyone who has already contributed, everybody who’s asking their friends, their family, strangers, to contribute to this, everyone who is raising funds through bake sales, through yard sales, through whatever creative means they have. This is part of making this biggest mobilization in U.S. history, to stop this regime that imperils all of humanity in the earth itself, this is a key, key component of it. It’s not that saturation is the only thing we need funds for, but we need to move on this really quickly and make November 5 known everywhere.
We mentioned this before, but I just want to emphasize again — people are are wondering, why are we waiting — we’re not waiting, but we do need millions in the streets of D.C., surrounding the White House, surrounding the Capitol, surrounding the illegitimate fascist packed Supreme Court. To do that, we need to build the infrastructure that people have have talked about, and we need to let those millions know this is on, and they need to be a part of it. Part of that is we start now with mass defiance and mass non-compliance, now; resisting every fascist escalation, not collaborating and not capitulating, having our institution standing up to illegitimate fascist extortion, not folding, in the face of it.
The cost of the disruption of our lives, the cost of the risk, the cost of all of that, is nothing in comparison to full on fascism. Just like right now, the capitulation is what’s contagious — so is courage. As we are engaging in mass defiance and mass non-compliance, we’re raising the demand: Trump Must Go Now!, and we’re building the momentum for November 5, launching this relentless, non violent, massive struggle. Many of you have had really incredible ideas on ways that you think we need to organize. So many great points about working with other organizations, so many resources that we need to be providing people, and you are needed to make that happen.
So if you’re interested in campus organizing, you’re needed. If you are interested in fundraising, you’re needed. If you are someone who’s adept in translation to Spanish in particular, but other languages as well, for our print materials, so that we can really reach all of the millions who need to be part of this — sign up to volunteer. If you can do print graphic design, help get this on podcasts and YouTube shows, MSNBC, and live on your favorite influencers channel, all of that, help with media and PR — sign up. If you want to do outreach to religious organizations, if you think it’s important that we’re reaching academics, if we’re reaching artists, be part of an outreach team. If you want to be spreading this on social media, whether it’s content sharing or content creation or video editing, you are needed. This happens only if we step in and step up to this historic challenge before us. Shout out to everyone who’s already signed up to volunteer.
Before we go into the Q and A, I want to share again if you have not committed to be in D.C., let’s get hundreds committing tonight to be in D.C., starting November 5, to demand: Trump Must Go Now! Sign up to be part of what needs to be the biggest, massive, most determined, yes, nonviolent, mobilization in U.S. history. I’m gonna ask, also, if you were considering whether or not to give you want to see these posters everywhere you want to see the stickers, everywhere you want to see thousands committing right now to be in D.C. starting November 5, your support is needed. Give as much as you can and then give a little bit more. We’re pushing to raise $25,000 total by Labor Day. Next, we addressed some questions that have been frequently raised.
Sunsara Taylor 57:41
What happens if we unseat the regime? I think, first of all [SG: Party!] That’s true. Actually, if we were able to… I want people to picture if there were millions and millions in the streets in such a sustained level that this regime really is put on the back foot; It starts to splinter; The fights among them start to come out; Other people who, right now have been attacked and silenced by the regime within the halls of power start to have their gumption and their wherewithal, and they start to find the legal means to…
They’re being flooded by lawsuit after lawsuit; The federal courts are not just accepting a lot of the… they’re already standing up, but they stand up even more; The AGS are pushing things; The National Guards men, a lot of them, are saying: We took an oath to the Constitution not to these unlawful orders. If those things start to happen and institutions start to fracture and and the people have the initiative… There’s gonna be a lot of different camps.
You know, a lot of people are saying: Are we gonna camp out? What are the logistics? I’m saying there’s gonna be a lot of different camps, literally, but there’s also gonna be a lot of different camps — different schools of thought, different ideas being contended. There’s gonna be people with different scenes who are over here and over there. If you look at mass outpourings that have happened, there’s there’s a lot of different culture and defiance and celebration, and there’s gonna be the joy of standing up. There’ll be the fear, there’ll be the risk, there’ll be sacrifice, but there’ll be the joy of standing up together.
There’ll be the outpouring; There’ll be the unity; There’ll be the things that people learn from each other; The mixing it up with people who are segregated and kept from each other in this society. There’ll be a whole lot of upliftment. There’ll be people taking it the streets around the world in response. If we succeed, first of all, it will be a party. I mean, it will be the biggest party, one of the biggest parties in the history of the world. All over the world, people will be celebrating and inspired by it. You do not remove a regime in this way without reversing who has initiative in society and where the political momentum is. Our view is that Trump must be removed.
We say: The Trump fascist regime must be removed. We think a lot of them could be brought in for criminal charges, so a lot of them could be removed. But whoever’s in power, even if some of the members of the regime are there, they’re going to be facing an aroused population. I think we have to. Stretch our imaginations, because this kind of political situation that would be created through the nonviolent struggle of the people is going to be different than an election where somebody accepts the results and you just change who’s in office and a few of their cabinet members, but the rest of the thing stays the same — policies change, and people are more familiar. But I want you to imagine the kind of massive political convulsion that would unseat a regime.
First of all, we don’t know how many people would be removed and charged and investigated alongside Trump. We know that there are many people who have violated the court orders, rule of law, carried out human rights atrocities already in the Trump administration. So many could be removed in charged in a court of law, and see where the charges go. Everybody has the right to due process. But the other thing is, whoever’s in power is going to be facing a changed political atmosphere. It’s worth noting that if we look at some historical examples, somebody like Nixon, when he came into office — I’m talking even before he was impeached and removed or resigned, when he came into office — he was escalating Vietnam.
He was determined to see it through and win that war on the terms that it was being fought. By the time, even before he was removed and resigned, he was having to withdraw troops, and that was because of factors that were bigger than his political views. It was because the U.S. was losing the war in Vietnam, but it was also losing the coherence of the country. The anti-war opposition in this country was ferocious. The campuses were not functional. Many of them had shut down because of the protests. Within the U.S. military itself, there were whole units that were refusing to go out and fight. They were defecting.
There were people who were deserting. There were people who were resisting and going to prison rather than going to fight. The U.S. could not reliably carry out its war there anymore, among major units… If you haven’t seen it, there’s a really important film, there’s two really important films. One is called Sir, No Sir, about GI resistance at that time, and one is called FTA, which is ‘F’ the Army — Jane Fonda and others were a part of it. If you can find these, Sir, No Sir is on Netflix, I believe. It’s an incredible film made by David Zeiger. It’s an incredible film. It gives a sense of the political atmosphere, the geo political reality and the political atmosphere in the country. The geopolitical reality internationally, and the political atmosphere in this country was such that even somebody like Nixon was having to give a lot of concessions to the demands of the people.
So when you set terms from below, you have that. There was a whole host of things that he was doing that were not about what was in his heart. We could go through many examples where that starts to happen because of the struggle from below. So I think two things we should imagine if this struggle succeeds. 1) There’s many, many people who could be removed, besides Trump, legitimately, and 2) Whoever is in power, whoever comes in and fills that void, is gonna be answering to this aroused population and change sense of initiative, and they’re gonna have to contend with that. So we don’t know, but it’ll be a more favorable situation for the masses of people.
Then there’ll be debates over where this needs to go. There’ll be different people saying: We’ve gone far enough. There’ll be some of us who say: We need to go farther. There’ll be debates about that, and that’s fine. We’ll have the space for those debates and the space for that struggle, which we will not have if fascism consolidates. First of all, there are a number of things, what if Trump declares martial law? I think the point of why we must do this is, he’s doing that. A lot of people say: If you protest, you’re gonna provoke… He does not need a pretext. He is moving. This is in my presentation. And a lot of people said: Oh, we know this, get to the plans.
But actually, we need to confront this in its full implications, or else any plans we make are on a different foundation. If we are thinking: Oh, if we do this, he might declare martial law — we’re not confronting the reality. He is militarily occupying D.C. and Los Angeles still right now, and he is preparing to go into Chicago without pretext, and he’s threatening New York and Oakland and many other places. He’s saying: Get used to this.
Yesterday, Stephen Miller went on Fox Television and said that the Democratic Party is an domestic extremist organization. These people are not stopping because we lay down. They are not stopping because we clear the streets and don’t give them a provocation. They are bulldozing, and they are going rapidly. So our only chance, and humanity’s only chance, humanity’s only hope, is for us to rise to the challenge of going into the streets in such massive numbers — not that they won’t try to crush us — but in such massive numbers that it’s difficult for them to do so; in such massive numbers that the fact that we have right on our side is so undeniable that if they try to come down with illegitimate repression — which, yes, they will, and their crazies will do crazy things and dangerous things — but that’s already happening.
We need such numbers and such righteous defiance and such joy and such morality in what we’re doing, and such disciplined nonviolence as well, that if they do this, and when they do acts of repression, it further delegitimizes them, and it further inspires others to come and stand with us. That is how every struggle has advanced. We do not want them to do it, but we wouldn’t have to do what we have to do if they weren’t committing crimes against humanity and preparing worse, then we wouldn’t have to go out there with the risks it entails. The idea that it’s safer to lay low… it might be safer for you as an individual, but it’s not safer for the immigrants and alligator Alcatraz. It’s not safer for the Black youth to wear having their faces shoved in the pavement and being pressed with federal charges right now for having an open container on the street — it’s not safer.
So we have to think about humanity. It’s not safer to lay low. It is safer if we all stand up. Then, any sacrifice that entails, and that ends up requiring, we have to have each other’s backs. We have to build the unity, and we have to turn all of it into a further advance on our side, because that’s how every struggle goes. You get in a situation — and this is one that will be favorable to us, this is what we want. It’s called the dictator’s dilemma. It’s a real thing. It’s happened all over the world where you have such a massive popular uprising that the dictator has a dilemma: If I let it go, will people feel inspired and encouraged and it’ll keep growing? or do I try to crush it and scare people away?
But if I try to crush it and it doesn’t work, and people come back stronger, then I look even more weak and vulnerable and inspires even more people to stand up. That dictator’s dilemma is going to be one that we have to ride. But the way you ride that is, you maintain that right is on our side. We conduct ourselves consistent with the world we’re fighting for, which is one where people come together, nonviolently, and thrash out the future, where we have respect for people with different languages and skin colors and genders, where we respect the rule of law and defend the rights that are supposed to be enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
Even for people who took an oath to the Constitution and for people like me who don’t believe in the U.S. Constitution, would like a different system, but as long as we are forced to live under this system, we’re gonna demand that the rights and the protections that are supposed to be inscribed in that constitution are extended to everybody. We’re gonna come together and demand that and fight for that, and make any sacrifice it takes from us redound to further growth and further inspiration. The fact is, we celebrate the people, the John Lewis’s of the world.
We celebrate the people who put it on the line and brought down Jim Crow. We celebrate the people who sacrificed so that women won the right to vote. We celebrate the people who gave their lives in disproportionate numbers, Black people in the Civil War to End the abomination of slavery. None of that happened without sacrifice. The idea that we’re to defeat fascism on the cheap is illusion, and it’s morally bankrupt illusion. But that doesn’t mean we take sacrifice lightly — we don’t. It actually is why we’re saying we have to be nonviolent. It’s why we’re saying we need to be massive in our numbers. It’s why we’re saying that we’re doing something that has a basis to succeed.
Because there are sections of the ruling class who don’t like what’s happening, who could be moved to act against it, but will not move without the compulsion from below. We’re doing something that has a basis to succeed, and sitting down and laying down and playing it safe has no basis to succeed, or to keep humanity safe, and it is a guarantee to give the future to a bunch of white supremacist, fascist, woman hating, environment destroying, science denying terrorists of the planet, and we can’t do that.
Sam Goldman 1:08:25
Thank you so much, Sunsara. Coco, did you want to add anything?
Coco Das 1:08:28
No, I thought that was a very good answer. I guess the only thing I would add is: There is a question of who are we gonna be? What we are being asked to become under this regime is unconscionable, and that is also part of the call. Everyone has to ask themselves… Every decent person has to ask themselves: What is required of me now? and: How do I rise to that challenge? There are more of us than there are of them. In every movement where millions have driven out a hated regime — Sunsara was talking about the dictators dilemma — people came back stronger and came back and came back, and the regime was not able to withstand that.
Sunsara Taylor 1:09:09
I also want to speak briefly to the question of, are we working with other organizations? First of all, I want to echo what Sam said at the beginning: We want to welcome everybody who is a part of a different organization on this Zoom tonight. We saw people sign in who work with Indivisible, who work with 5051 [Fifty-fifty-one] who work with the different vets organizations, different local organizations, it’s very important. We are doing our best in Refuse Fascism to reach out to as many organizations as we can, but actually this is going to spread because you are part of doing so too.
We want to make clear, we put on our poster: Initiated by Refuse Fascism, and open to all to be part of the biggest mass, nonviolent outpouring in U.S. history to drive this regime from power. This is not our thing. This is not our next protest, our next organizing effort. People do protests, they do things, and it’s good and. People are doing a lot of really important work. There are people who are doing networks to defend immigrants. They’re doing networks to do legal clinics. T
hey’re escorting people to their meetings. There’s there’s people who are funding abortions and helping women get across state lines to get abortions to save their lives, or to just preserve their independence and keep them from forced motherhood and all the suffocation of that, when it’s not a choice. There’s people who are doing many, many different things. I can’t list them all. They’re important things — doing legal observation at protest, doing lawsuits against what Trump is doing against the law. All of this is important. We are not saying don’t do that. We’re saying do all that, but marshal it, and take this up as part of this. Not because we say so, but because, really, nothing else measures up.
Objectively, Trump will overwhelm all the acts of resistance, all the heroism that we’ve seen. He will overwhelm it, and he will bulldoze it, and he will exact and extract revenge and make living examples of the terror that he inflicts. That’s what he’s been doing. It has a chilling effect. We’ve already seen that the protests and the numbers are diminishing. I’m not saying we’re defeated, but they are diminishing, and that will continue There is a really important concept that I learned years ago — somebody put this together very well, and I have had it in my head for years.
They said: That which you will not resist and mobilize to stop — not just resist, but mobilize to stop — you will learn or be forced to accept. If we do not mobilize to stop this regime — if all we do is resist it, as righteous as that is — we will learn or be forced to accept its nightmare. That is what people are learning and being forced to accept. However reluctantly, however much they hate it, if you don’t see a pathway to defeat it, you find your place in it. That’s what history has shown, and we’re seeing it around us every day.
So there’s a need for us to go to a whole different level, all hands on deck. It’s every organization, but it’s also, and it’s really essential, it’s not just the organizations. This is gonna be millions and millions of people who’ve never been part of any organization, who’ve never felt politics mattered in their life in any kind of urgent way before, but what they’re seeing now is unprecedented. We’ve never seen… I don’t know if we’ve ever seen the scientists at the Center for Disease Control — how much more mainstream can you get? Government workers, scientists who work for the U.S., government around healthcare, walking out in protest because of how outrageous and murderous what Trump is doing is; murderous to real lives and murderous to human store of knowledge.
All over the world, this is gonna cost lives. They’re just one example of people who are not your usual suspects. There’s millions who need to be mobilized, who are way beyond any organization. The last thing I’ll say about this is in 2020 we saw a glimpse of this, when, after George Floyd was murdered by the police, and Breonna Taylor, and others. 16 million people came out. They came out in towns and among numbers that had that had never been organized before, and in little, tiny, so called red states and red cities and towns and rural areas all throughout the South, the Midwest, everywhere else. There are millions and millions of people who are feeling the shock of this, or who could be inspired to act against this regime and with the demand that Trump Must Go Now! if we reach them and inspire them.
So I’m saying: Yes, we need to reach to all the organizations. We need to fight for, to unite all who can be united and have principled unity. We don’t have to agree, and we won’t agree on many things, but we need to agree this regime must go. None of what any of us want is going to be possible if this fascism consolidates. We need to go to the organizations. We need you to help. Go to the organizations, go to the people that you work with. Reach out to them. They need to be hearing about this from you and many other people, but also work with us to get to many, many, many people beyond those who have ever been organized before, because all of us have to be in this.
Sam Goldman 1:13:57
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. Follow us @RefuseFascism, including, yes, we are on Bluesky and on Tiktok @RefuseFashizm, where Fascism is spelled F-A-S-H-I-Z-M. Thanks to Richie Marini, Lina Thorne and Mark Tinkleman for producing the show. Until next Sunday. In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America!