The Danger Grows — So Must the Movement to Drive Trump Out

Episode 263

Sam speaks with Baltazar Enriquez from the ⁠Little Village Community Council⁠ in Chicago, which has been the center of Trump’s threats in recent weeks.

Then, we share excerpts from the organizers’ webinar with Andy Zee, Sunsara Taylor and Coco Das held on Friday September 19, discussing how the murder of Charlie Kirk has nothing to do with any positive change and that It must NOT be used to accelerate fascist repression and atrocity. They delve into the reality that the need for mass nonviolent but determined struggle to drive Trump from power is greater and more urgent than ever.

Mentioned in this episode:

Music for this episode: Penny the Snitch by Ikebe Shakedown

Music for this episode: Penny the Snitch by Ikebe Shakedown

Episode 263 The Danger Grows —…he Movement to Drive Trump Out

Mon, Sep 15, 2025 7:09AM • 1:02:11

Sam Goldman 00:23

Hello, welcome to episode 263 of the Refuse Fascism podcast. This show is brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism, is working to unite all who can be united to drive out the Trump fascist regime through sustained, mass, nonviolent resistance. Today, we’re sharing excerpts from a webinar this past Friday night with Refuse Fascism leaders Coco das Andy Z and Sarah Taylor. They break down how the murder of Charlie Kirk has nothing to do with bringing about positive change, and why it must not be used to accelerate fascist repression and atrocity. They drive home the reality that the need for mass, nonviolent, determined struggle to drive Trump from power is greater and more urgent than ever.

But first two urgent developments this week. The Supreme Court has green lit federal authorities to carry out sweeping racial profiling and violate basic rights, ensuring even more suffering and death. Trump was forced to scrap his plans to send the National Guard into Chicago, not out of benevolence, but because of pushback in the streets and from city and state leaders. This is a powerful lesson in the impact of mass defiance and mass non-compliance, but it is not a retreat. It’s a redirection.

Trump is now aiming this horror at Memphis, where the governor stands ready to collaborate. Amid all this ICE agents killed Saverio Villegas Gonzalez in Franklin Park, Illinois. Shortly after that happened, this past Friday, I spoke with Balthazar Enriquex, president of the Little Village community council in Chicago. Balthazar has been on the front lines, confronting ICE terror, organizing immigrant neighborhoods, mobilizing resistance against National Guard threats, and demanding justice for those targeted. We talk about what’s happening on the ground in Chicago as ICE terror surges. Have a listen.

Sam Goldman 02:16

I want to thank you so much for joining the show and for taking the time to talk with us.

Balthazar Enriquez 02:26

Thank you for having me.

Sam Goldman 02:27

Can you share with our listeners what the situation in Chicago is looking like right now, with these ICE operations, these Gestapo style raids ramping up? What’s happening in the community that you work?

Balthazar Enriquez 02:41

I’m from Little Village in Chicago, which is one of the largest Mexican American neighborhoods — very small business oriented, a lot of restaurants, a lot of ma and pa shops. So we have a lot of tourism. Right around our celebration for independence, Trump decides to attack Chicago by clearly targeting the Mexican community. We’ve been ready since his inauguration. We were out there passing out flyers, educating the day laborers, the temporary agency workers, about their rights — you know, not to open the door, and it worked. Tom Homan, is right now, you know, they’ve been very aggressive, kidnapping our people, our street vendors. We just had an incident today where ICE agents shot at the person they were trying to detain. [The] person had an accident, crashed into a semi trailer. The reports hadn’t really been out how many shots they shot at him.

Sam Goldman 03:37

Thank you so much for that update. I was just thinking about how ICE is launching this operation in Chicago, despite objections from the mayor and the Illinois Governor. They had this operation Midway Blitz. They have, is it the naval base?, that they turned into, like a hub for DHS? What else can you tell us about how people are experiencing this?

Balthazar Enriquez 04:03

Here is Chicago, and instead of Illinois, the immigrant community has picked up not only Little Village, but other suburbs and neighborhoods. Because immigrants come with the dream. They come to work. They come with that mentality of having a better life. Because back at home, they’re suffering from poverty or political oppression, crime, from the government. They come hungry for a better life, and we contribute a lot to this economy, and we don’t get nothing back. Social Security — so many billions of dollars that go into the Social Security system, and those undocumented don’t get that money back; into the Medicare system, the Illinois taxes, city tax on city, county tax.

We give so much in return and get nothing back. We get the crumbs. This administration is trying to make it even harder for us to not get the services that we need, when it comes down to health care, mental health and especially education. They went after our education so we could continue being their Uber drivers, their landscapers, their factory workers. They want to keep us oppressed, and we’re fighting back that oppression with education. Education is key, and we want quality education because our kids are smart. They could be the next doctors, the next astronauts, and we have to fight and prepare them for the world.

We’ve been here, fighting in Little Village for mental health services and education. We’ve been asking for more bilingual teachers. Cause if children speak one, two languages… it’s better to speak foreign languages because you can be more useful around the world. He’s going against that. They don’t want to teach foreign languages no more. It shows that he generally wants to keep us ignorant, keep us oppressed, and like that, we’ll end up falling into the system, where jails are being built now. They’re making millions of dollars out of the jail system, out of our people, our Black and brown people. We need to change that, that story around by being united and keeping on the forefront of fighting for our people’s rights.

Sam Goldman 06:08

Thanks for that. I was wondering whether, have you seen in the community more agents than usual? Have you seen more businesses closed out of fear? What has it been looking like in Litttle Village?

Balthazar Enriquez 06:20

The sales have definitely dropped again, because we have a lot of tourism during this time, so the sales have dropped by 50%. We haven’t seen any businesses close, but if this continues, in the long run, they will close. Have we seen more agents? Yes, we have seen more agents in the neighborhood. We have a strong presence of them, but we have patrol groups that we’re working with. We have our campaign, Blow the Whistle on ICE, and we have kicked out ICE agents out of the neighborhood. A bunch of us came out with our whistles, and we started whistling, and, you know, they got scared and left; saved a family for being deported. They contacted us and they said: Hey, thanks for your quick response, we were able to get away.

These are the things that we could do as a community, as people, they want to get involved, as people that say: How can I help out? Just join the campaign, contact your local organization, or if you’re in Chicago, the Little Village community council, or working with Rev Comms, and other organizations that are the forefront to keep pushing back, and I think we’re gonna continue doing that for the next four years.

Sam Goldman 07:26

It’s so great to hear about the blow your whistle and the concrete actions that people can take to support their neighbors and just to support people in Little Village and beyond who are being hunted right now. I think that there’s a lesson to what you’re doing — you’re doing it in Chicago, but I think people in other cities, could be taking that up too.

Balthazar Enriquez 07:46

Yeah, I think that’s why we want to spread the word. It does work.

Sam Goldman 07:50

Definitely, it’s been very heartening to see some of these like in Chicago, I’ll see in the news, a 12 hour protest at a detention center or something. It is very important that people are resisting. I wanted to know if there was anything else that you wanted people listening, especially those outside of Chicago, to understand about what’s at stake right now?

Balthazar Enriquez 08:13

We’re gonna continue showing the resistance, that we’re not… we continue fighting this fascist government. Mostly, show our pride, and we’re not gonna let this government break our pride of screaming Viva Mexico! Being part of this nation… we have paid with our blood, we have paid with our labor, our sweat. We’re more American than yellow cheese.

Sam Goldman 08:35

I wanna thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us, to share your on the ground insight, your perspective, and your time. If people want to connect with the Little Village community council in Chicago, where should we direct people to?

Balthazar Enriquez 08:52

They can send an email to Little Village community council. Stop by at 3610 West, 26th street, right in the heart of little village in Chicago, and take a follow us on Facebook, it’s Little Village Community Council, or El Barrio de la Vita 26. You can join us by coming celebrating this Sunday to our Mexican parade and be Mexican for a day.

Sam Goldman 09:13

Thank you so much.

Balthazar Enriquez 09:15

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Sam Goldman 09:21

Resisting ICE is urgent and necessary, and nothing short of driving the whole Trump fascist regime from power will stop this atrocity. For a just future, we must unite and flood the streets of Washington, D.C. in nonviolent, relentless, determined resistance, beginning Wednesday, November 5, and not stopping until Trump is removed from power. Next up, you’ll hear Coco Das, Andy Zee, and Sunsara Taylor on the growing dangers revealed by this week’s events, and the urgency of mobilizing the biggest nonviolent outpouring in US history, beginning Wednesday, November 5th.

Coco Das 10:01

We’re living in very fraught times. A lot is happening. There was a major incident this week, and we thought it’s gonna be important to hear from and speak to and orient people towards the urgency of the call for November 5th. That is growing more urgent by the day. And to kind of talk about how quickly the terrain is changing, and what kinds of questions are coming up around that. I want to introduce Andy Zee. Andy Zee is a co-initiator of Refuse Fascism, a member of the National Leadership Board, along with myself, and Sunsara Taylor and others, and a spokesperson for Revolution Books and a follower of the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian. So welcome, Andy. It’s really good to have you here tonight.

Andy Zee 10:52

All right. Thank you, Coco. Good to be here too. I appreciate the people who’ve come on with very short notice. We’re holding tonight’s webinar on this short notice because of the intensification of the situation that we and the people this country face with the brutal assassination of Charlie Kirk. As our statement said, which you’re gonna read shortly, the murder of Charlie Kirk had nothing to do with any positive change. It must not be used to accelerate fascist repression and atrocity, and the need for mass non violent but determined struggle to drive Trump from power is greater and more urgent than ever.

I just want to say one thing. We said in our first statement that actions such as this murder of Charlie Kirk have nothing to do with the principles and the political objectives of Refuse Fascism, and the call that we have put forth for November 5th for massive, sustained nonviolent resistance by millions of people with the goal of actually defeating fascism and driving the Trump fascist regime from power. The assassination of Kirk does harm to, and it works against what is actually needed to defeat fascism, and it has led to calls from the government, as well as from the MAGA base, for further repression on people and their rights.

So Coco is gonna read what we put out as a subsequent statement that was more in depth, and I’m gonna say some things about this murder and what we need to do in relationship to it, and then go into some of the things we plan to discuss about Refuse Fascism — why we have to do what we’re doing and planning to do on November 5th, what’s the basis for us to do this November 5th, and how we could actually win, and how we have to get organized. So Coco, why don’t you read that statement? I think it’s very important for people to hear it.

Coco Das 12:39

Refuse Fascism responds to Trump’s September 10 statement. The murder of Charlie Kirk had nothing to do with any positive change. It must not be used to accelerate fascist repression and atrocity. The need for mass nonviolent but determined struggle to drive Trump from power is greater and more urgent than ever. On the evening of September 10, Donald Trump made a statement from the Oval Office blaming the radical left for the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Trump did this even as the identity and motivation of the shooter was still unknown. Trump is setting terms of blame and retribution, inflaming the MAGA social base and mobilizing the repressive apparatus to go after individuals, organizations and media who oppose his regime and movement, Trump selectively listed incidents of violence against hard right and fascist figures, acts that have nothing to do with a just struggle for a better future. Trump creates a lying picture of the intents and methods of those who speak out and are committed to the mass action of millions to bring about a future where immigrants, women, LGBTQ people, Black people and the people of the world are treated as full human beings.

The truth is that the overwhelming majority of recent political violence has been carried out by the radical right and outright fascist like those associated with Trump’s MAGA movement. In fact, right wing extremists have killed more than 330 people in the U.S. over the last decade — that’s 75% of the people killed from political violence. This includes the violent, murderous attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Trump and his fascist MAGA movement are seizing on the horrific murder of Charlie Kirk to further demonize their opposition and to accelerate their repression of First Amendment rights to protest and dissent.

Trump even claimed that Americans using their free speech rights to publicly recognize the parallels between the rise of the Nazis and what is happening under Trump today are “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.” This illegitimate attack on the First Amendment right to speak freely, to draw the lessons of history and to act on them with nonviolent determination must not be allowed. The tens of millions of decent people in this country must not let the Trump fascist regime exploit the horrific and criminal assassination of the fascist youth leader Charlie Kirk to put us on the political defensive, scared into silence and submission to Trump’s many sided fascist offensive, including an escalating and vicious assault on Latino communities by his masked ICE and Border Patrol thugs.

We refuse to accept a fascist America. Fascism is not a curse word. It is a different form of brutal rule. Becoming silent or capitulating in advance to these threats will only facilitate a total lockdown of society and government — with no due process, no rights, no rule of law and dire consequences for all of humanity. The need for an unrelenting nonviolent struggle of millions to drive Trump’s fascist regime from power grows ever greater. On November 5, from across this nation, a million of us need to come to D.C. and fill the streets with non violent protest. From that day forward, we don’t stop until the regime is removed from power.

Andy Zee 16:13

Thank you, Coco. I think it’s important. I want to repeat that last paragraph that you read from our statement, where it says: “We refuse to accept a fascist America. Fascism is not a curse word. It’s a different form of brutal rule. Becoming silent or capitulating in advance to these threats will only facilitate a total lockdown of the government — with no due process, no rights, no rule of law and dire consequences for all of humanity. The need for an unrelenting non violent struggle of millions to drive the Trump’s fascist regime from power grows ever greater, and on November 5, from across the nation, a million of us need to come to D.C. and fill the streets with nonviolent protests.

From that day forward, we won’t stop until the regime is removed from power.” What’s crucial to understand about this is that no decent person should condone this brutal murder, and that it does great harm to the struggle for a just world. It certainly has nothing to do with, as I said, the mission and methods of Refuse Fascism. And in fact, as our statement says, it has actually caused the fascist regime to accelerate its agenda and its MAGA blood thirsty followers to call for revenge. Trump’s using this as a pretext in what is historically typical for fascist regimes. You can study this. You can look up the Reichstag fire in Germany, where they take advantage of something like this to advance their brutish and openly terroristic repression against their rivals in the government and against the tens of millions of people who oppose this fascist regime, and against all those they’ve always despised, like the immigrants, the LBGT community, Black people, women and anybody who opposes them.

So there’s been some infantile applauding of this murder by some people and forces who oppose Trump because Charlie Kirk was a major and a vile spokesperson and organizer of the MAGA movement who played a major poisonous role, especially among college students. So that this is happening from some people and forces and oppose Trump a lot on the internet. We have to understand that this does real harm. It undermines the integrity of millions of people who hate this regime, and it has nothing in common with the ethics of a movement of millions of decent people who want this gone.

It’s going to unleash more repression against the struggle against fascism. There is, however, a right way to respond to this, recognizing that while condemning this assassination should not mean that we look aside from, let alone compromise, our understanding of the tremendous fascist role that Kirk played. This guy was a stone racist, a misogynist. He called for ten million immigrants to be deported, and wanted to make sort of an advertising campaign out of that. He was a vicious antisemite, which means somebody opposed to Jewish people for being Jewish, not for any opposition to the State of Israel. And he was a stone cold, smirking fascist, who delighted in diminishing and degrading people for his own advantage.

He wrapped this up in a self righteous Christian fascist, political theological cloak. He was a fan boy to Donald Trump. Kirk was such a depraved fascist, in the facade of a good looking, cool, just one of the guys, that it can disguise what he actually was. Jeff Sharlet, a writer who we’ve worked with in the past, said on Democracy Now that Charlie Kirk quote called for televised public executions and that he had a pretty broad category of people in mind. But what was really chilling, Sharlet said was that he wanted this to be required viewing for children, school children — that’s the end of his quote.

So we have to speak the truth about Charlie Kirk without, in any way shape or form, condoning his murder, while recognizing that the horrific fascist future he stood for and played a decisive role in organizing is upon us, and that future is right here, right now, and we have to organize with every sinew that we have before 11/05, the Fall of the Trump Fascist Regime. We are already in a state of emergency. There’s troops in the streets of this city where I am now, Washington, D.C. They’re in Los Angeles. They’re gathering outside of other cities at National Guard and Army bases. They’re in cities that are largely Black or have a large immigrant population, or both. They’re in cities that are controlled by Democratic mayors. They’re in cities where there is Black leadership. This is truly the Confederacy coming back with a vengeance in a 21st Century way.

If you don’t get fully what this is about, think about that guided missile that incinerated a fishing boat off the coast of Venezuela. That is a concentration of a fascist move — a disregard for international law, a disregard of the right to a hearing. Nobody knows, and they didn’t state any evidence for whether these were fishermen, whether they were doing anything untoward. And even if it turns out, as they claim, that these were drug runners, they are still entitled to a hearing to present evidence and to be judged according to the rule of law. But what you saw here was the total elimination of the rule of law just on the say of the President. So the murder of Charlie Kirk is only gonna accelerate from their side what they want to do.

Yet, I think at the same time, we have to recognize that there’s no other organization that I’ve read about yet or that has issued any kind of statement that is refusing to either gloat at his murder as a matter of principle, as I’ve just discussed and is in our statement, or to cower in fear from what might be unleashed, which is happening in different quarters, where people are saying: Let’s tone everything down, because if we do anything now, they’ll really be bad, or conciliate in the disgusting process of the beatification of Kirk by Trump and the MAGA fascists, making him the new battle cry to vanquish the rights of the people.

We need to recognize that there is an opening for the only way forward, and we’ve gotta seize it. We’ve gotta get out there and talk to people. Yes, speak the truth about this. Yes, warn about the measures that are gonna come down as they come down from the regime, but get into what this is really about, which is this is about the consolidation of a fascist America. As we say in Refuse Fascism, in the name of humanity, we do not accept a fascist America. So I think it’s important that we continue to go back to and review the fundamentals of what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how we could actually win.

The key thing that we have going for us, or a key thing, but really crucial, right at this moment, as we sit here about seven weeks out from November 5, is the call for November 5. I don’t know if your flyer in your area looks like this, this is a national flyer. It says: The time has come for the fall the fascist Trump regime, beginning November 5, 2025 Washington, D.C. — this is a call, and this is very important, very important, I’m gonna get into this more — initiated by RefuseFascism.org and welcome to all to join the biggest non violent mobilization in history. This is critical. We’ve put out a call, and we’re calling people to take it up.

But what they need to take up is being in D.C. in an unrelenting struggle to drive the regime from power. We want to work with everybody. We want to form what we call an ecumenical welcoming center here in Washington, D.C., we’re working on securing a place where all the organizations who want to be openly on board together can be welcoming people in and helping them get located and give morning briefings as well as online. But if people want to organize their group and do their own thing here after November 5 and on November 5, well that’s that’s okay too.

We’ve initiated this, but we’re not asking to control everything. We’re trying to unite with everyone to carry out this really historic mission that, should we succeed, will be historic. Because this will be one of the first times, if not the first time that fascism that was well underway in being consolidated in an advanced country like this — advanced in the sense that it had a large amount of production and wealth and military, without being stopped by an external military force. This is a big deal. It’s a tall order, but it is so essential for the future of humanity, because the necessity to do this is fascism.

This call says right at the beginning, humanity’s only hope is for the decent people of this country to rise in our millions. We cannot wait for a future and rigged elections. We must drive the Trump fascist regime from power, and we’re going to begin on November 5. It says: Surround the White House, surround the Capitol, surround the illegitimate fascist packed Supreme Court, and come back again and again and across the country. Refuse to comply. That’s a call to people in government institutions, private institutions, universities, health centers, everywhere. Refuse to comply with fascist orders. Split your institution if you have to. Get out in the street and organize the same thing outside, or force the other people out in the street.

This is a battle for the future. It’s a battle for a just world. It’s a step that we’re taking towards that. But if we allow this regime to consolidate, it will be anything, but — it will be a horror for humanity. That can’t be over emphasized. In fact, just in listening to things, it’s underestimated all the time what this will actually mean, including by people in our movement. The real horror that this is going to bring to people. This used to be called Chocolate City. It’s still a majority Black city, and for decades, there’s been mass incarceration, dogging of the youth, police murder. People know that. People have been organized around that.

Some of us who are work with the RevComs have called this a slow genocide. This will be a fast genocide. Trump has built a social base on the people that he and his social base despise. The call goes on to say: The Trump fascist regime is illegitimate. What it is demanding we become is unconscionable. At every level of society and every institution, tens of millions of us know this in our bones. If we dare, we can defeat a horror that threatens humanity’s very survival. If we fail to even try, future generation, if they even exist, will never forgive us. This is fascism. It’s a different form of brutal rule. It cannot be lived with. It must be defeated.

This is a necessity that we face. It is steamrolling ahead, and it is very possible, in fact, likely, we see it happening, that in the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk, which itself was unconscionable, but on a whole other level, this regime will seize on this to create and advance their own mayhem and to advance their struggle to totally lock down society. So this necessity, that this is fascism, also gives rise to the basis for us to actually defeat it. How so? Because there are tens of millions of people in this country who hate this. Many of them are not active yet. Several million come out now and again on June 14 and hopefully again. And we should do everything we can to see that people come out on the 18th of October, for No Kings Day, and then it’s on to the fifth of November.

The basis is in these people. We have to organize them. We have to arouse them. We have to get to them, what the problem is: This is fascism. There’s no living with it. And the solution is what we’re calling for on November 5. So what are we calling for? We’re calling for a massive struggle get to D.C. Think of the Million Man March. Think of the Women’s March, a situation where the city is brought to a halt and then it continues. Not everybody will stay the whole time. People will come, people will go. It’ll become a bit like an accordion. It’ll expand and it’ll contract, but it’s unrelenting, and as it continues, with high points and low points and counter demonstrations from the fascists, most likely different things happening, possibly repression, maybe even likely so of different forms.

In the face of this, there will be a political crisis in this country such that they’re having difficulty, they’re stymied, in the full implementation of their fascist program. In this happening, this divide in this country can realign institutions. More and more people coming over to the side of the people who want to resist this, who said all along: This is really bad. Other people say: Just keep your nose down. They’re beginning to move over here. This happens down at the bottom of society, but most important and most decisive for us to be able to win, it’ll happen up top. Don’t forget, if you don’t know the historical reality of this, every fascist regime has to destroy and goes out to destroy its opposite in the ruling class.

Just yesterday, the former fascist president of Brazil was convicted of trying to do his own January 6. But within that, he had a plot to assassinate the previous president, who is now the current president. This is, historically how this goes, and it is what you can see before your eyes here in this country, with somebody unleashed and inspired by their movement going into the house of the Speaker, at that time, Nancy Pelosi, to bash her over there with a hammer instead, did it to her husband. You’ve seen the congresswoman in the state of Minnesota, former Speaker of the House of Minnesota, being shot dead along with her husband. You’ve seen representative Padilla in Los Angeles thrown to the ground in a public meeting. You’ve seen Congresswoman in New Jersey arrested and roughed up, and the mayor of Newark arrested, and overall calls for literally the execution of the former chief of staff, Mark Milley, and the arrest of former President Obama.

All this stuff needs to be taken seriously, and it indicates the direction that things are going. But the other side of this is that if the people create such a crisis from below, you can start seeing realignments happening in these institutions and then finding the means and the ways to remove Trump and to exert a significant defeat to this fascist regime. Now, this is a very important analysis, and it’s one that I have to say, the framework of this was developed by Bob Avakian, the revolutionary leader who I follow, who’s developed a new communism. You can go to his social media and read about this from a revolutionary perspective and in great depth.

I very much recommend that you do so. But it’s something that we, together with other people, have adapted this analysis, because we think it’s true that there is the potential, if the people rise up to be able to take advantage of the fact that there are these great divides to create a situation where he’s removed. You see this every day, just one small example of it that actually is one that has literally millions of lives at stake. This absolute lunatic charlatan, Robert Kennedy Jr, who’s now head of the whole apparatus of concerned with the health of the country and literally the world. You see that this is somebody who is preparing for major pandemics. How is he preparing? By developing vaccines and ways to treat people and community health care?

No, by actually making it impossible for people to get, to get vaccines. You know, when I was younger, there were measles epidemics, and it was something that every parent was very concerned about, because it could have life affecting changes for people, and very dire consequences, and that was cured through the vaccine. Now it’s an option — free choice — but it’s actually free choice to die. He’s eliminated research on crucial diseases — interrupted it such that much of the work that was done becomes destroyed and difficult to recover. It’s part of the whole fascist agenda to obliterate the truth and the search for it and critical thinking.

It’s really, as it says in our call, I believe everything decent in society targeting, it says in the call: He’s cutting science and medicine, costing millions of lives, depleting humanity’s store of knowledge, destroying truth, drowning out reason, subjugating the arts to fascism, cruelty and conformity — targeting everything that is decent, moral and good, all on the whim of a debase lunatic tyrant and his lunatic fascist core of people. With a defense sec… oh, Department of War Secretary with a crusade cross tattooed on his chest. Look up the Crusades. It was not a good thing. Many people perished. It was persecution. It was really one of those horrors of humanity, and we might be entering another one, unless we do what we need to do, which is, November 5.

This has to be massive. But right now we’ve gotta get organized. We have to step back and say: Are we really doing this on the level it needs to be done? How does this become something that everybody is talking about? Here in Washington, I met with somebody yesterday. They said: Well, where’s your organizing center? I said: Oh, we don’t have one. Well, we got to get one. So now people are turning their attention, and we’re going to get one in the next couple of weeks. We have to move heaven and Earth to do these things. I’m trying to, and I think other people here and I hope around the country, are talking to people in other organizations and saying we’ve got to actually get in the room together. Have some big programs. If it’s got some element of dialog and debate, all the better.

But everybody who can be united must be united. [To] anybody who tries to divide the people, needs to be said: What the hell are you doing? Do you understand what we’re facing? Are you okay with that? Do you think you can live with that? Well, if you can, then I don’t have much to say to you, but if you can’t live with that, then let’s talk about how you’re going to get out in the streets and do what needs to be done. Because we have only one shot at this. We have one shot. It’s really great that there’s going to be another [No] Kings Day, but that is not going to do it. I’ll be just straight up about that. It could be very good. It could actually raise people’s sites, if there’s millions of people who come out on the day more than on June 14, but then they go home.

This regime can tolerate that. They can’t tolerate what we’re calling for. So that gives us a shot at this. Those of us who are in the leading group of Refuse Fascism will say to you, if you ask, and somebody might ask: Well, how you know this is going to work? Well, we know that it could work, but whether or not it works depends on all of us. And yes, it is a long shot. It is not gonna be easy. They control the Supreme Court, both houses of Congress, the executive. They’ve purged all kinds of people from other institutions, from the military to the Veterans Association to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, they’re trying to abolish the Department of Education.

So, yeah, it’s not going to be easy. It is a difficult shot, but it is a real shot. And not doing it is a virtual guarantee that society will be locked down. Some people say: But if you do this, you might bring military rule. I saw that on social media, as I was looking at a bunch of National Guard people on the street here, and then over at The Mall, these masked men, these ICE things, throwing an immigrant to the ground and throwing them in a van and taking them, who knows where, maybe to a concentration camp in the deserts of Texas, or maybe they’re going to ship him to Africa or some other place that he has no fucking ties to. We are in a fascist regime. We are living under a fascist regime. They have not fully consolidated it.

The window still is open. The door is still ajar, and there are people who want to see that door thrown all the way open. There are people from the masses of people, millions of people feel this way. And there are people all the way up in the government and in society who also feel deep down and sometimes even close to the surface, that there’s no living with this fascism. Since that is the case, it’s on us to organize like crazy now, to step it up, to challenge people, to give people the tools, the organizing tools to do this. To make this possible, we have to raise a lot, a lot of money. I said, a million calls, a million of these. We need tens, hundreds of thousands of posters up on the wall. We need the organizing center. There’s a lot of things that we need.

The we is Refuse Fascism, but not just Refuse Fascism, it’s we, the people who want to fight to avert a great catastrophe for humanity. Who in their hearts feel: In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America, and recognize that Trump must go if there is to be a future at all; who feel deeply that his reversing every environmental law over the past decades and promoting fascist fuel could get us way past the tipping point on saving the environment. And you can see his threats to accelerate war, which could be nuclear war. So with this, I want to wrap this up and welcome Sunsara and Coco back.

Coco Das 36:55

Why don’t we start with this one: What can I do? Three things I can do starting tomorrow. How do you prioritize? Sunsara, I see you nodding.

Sunsara Taylor 37:05

Yeah. I want to say three things. Number one: Take and print out the copy of the call. This is on our website. If you go there, you can print it. It’s got the text that makes the argument for what we’re facing in the fascist regime and why we can’t wait for the next elections. The Fascism is consolidating now. He must be driven from power through the mass nonviolent actions of the people. It makes the case.

Number one, print it out on your home printer. Take it to Kinko’s, make a million copies, or as many as you can do. Ask somebody to hook you up with a discount, if they’re sympathetic, and go wherever you can and hand it out. Two: Make plans to come to D.C. on November 5. Come. If you have to come late, come late. Come, stay as long as you can. If you can only come for the day, come for the day. Come from wherever you are. Come to D.C. That’s number two. Number three: Donate and ask everybody you know to donate and take up fundraising activities. I wanna say just slightly more about each of these.

To boil it down, three things: spread the call for November 5 — spread the call for the fall of the Trump fascist regime, the biggest nonviolent outpouring in U.S. history to save humanity from a fascist future. Two, make your plans to come to D.C. on November 5. And three, donate as generously as you can at RefuseFascism.org/donate, and raise money from others. And I just want to say, notoriously, for those who know, the Yankees fan base in New York City, it is not traditionally thought of as the most progressive or radical minded social base. Yesterday, Donald Trump showed up and was resoundingly booed by the crowd. I mean, there’s progressive people who go to see the Yankees, but it’s not the hotbed of where you would typically think to go find radical minded people. Trump showed up and he was booed. He was cheered by some, but the boos were louder, in a crowd of however many thousands were there.

It’s an indication — anywhere there are crowds of people, take out this call to action. Don’t just go looking for the ones and twos in a radical corner of society. There are millions being jolted. Go to sporting events and hand it out. Go on the transit systems and hand it out. Go to college campuses and hand it out. Take it to congregations and churches and synagogues and mosques and hand it out. Take it to farmers markets, to concerts — wherever people gather — and hand it out. If 50 people on this call were on a mission to get a thousands out tomorrow, we have gotten out 50,000 towards that million. It would make a difference.

There are people everywhere who are agonized. Do not underestimate the impact that handing this out, one-by-one to people, can have. Have a bucket with you, have a can with you, ask people to throw in donations if they’re interested. Sign them up to follow RefuseFascism, to volunteer through the website or follow on Instagram. Connect them if they wanna stop to talk, but get it out. Then, yes, go to events where there are people speaking; town halls, get it to your representatives. If there’s concerts, try to get it to the musicians; try to get it to the prominent voices. It’s a yes and yes and yes and.

We firmly believe, and the evidence shows again and again, there are millions and millions who are agonized. This call speaks to and makes the argument. You don’t have to be ready to go and give a presentation, you just hand it out. Use the points in it. So that’s one of the most important things, and honestly, we could collectively transform the social base for this in three days, if we were on a mission to get this out by the thousands and thousands, tens of thousands. This is gonna be a grassroots movement that overwhelms the political paralysis and uncorks it, based on everything that’s in that call and everything that Andy and Coco have been talking about. Obviously, the funds matter, and being in D.C. really matters. So those three things. The reason I’m putting so much on this call is that’s something everybody can take and run with and multiply our numbers very rapidly.

Coco Das 40:58

There’s a cluster of questions around overcoming small forces that we have currently, while needing to get this out to millions of people. Sunsara laid out some of how that dynamic can start having these small forces, and how do you make real this point that’s in the call that this is initiated by Refuse Fascism, welcoming all — every organization and individual of conscience who cares about the future of humanity — to join the largest nonviolent mobilization to D.C. in U.S. history. How you make that real? There’s a question of how to work with other organizations, how to go out to other organizations. There are also might be some misconceptions of how we are or are not uniting with other organizations.

Sunsara Taylor 41:51

This does need to be everybody who does not want a fascist America — everybody who doesn’t want to see the rise and return and vengeance of the Confederacy — everybody who is horrified by women dying from miscarriages and being forced to have children against their will — everybody who doesn’t want to see trans people demonized, erased, dehumanized and brutalized, which is also going to escalate — everybody who is horrified by masked unidentified agents disappearing brown skinned people, yes, undocumented, but a lot of other people too, and they’re not stopping to check, without due process, and putting them in concentration camps — everybody who doesn’t want to see the end of due process, and dragging humanity backwards on science and medicine and rational thinking. All the things that are in the call for the fall of the Trump fascist regime.

Everybody who doesn’t want to see those things needs to be part of this. Not because we called it, but because, objectively, we are at a historic juncture where Fascism is either going to consolidate and lock down and take humanity with it, or we are going to come from behind and rise in our millions and our tens of millions and create such a non violent political earthquake from below that those in power are not able to barrel forward with their fascist program; where you create such a profound outpouring from below that those who are still in the halls of power, who have not yet been purged, but are being purged, are both compelled, and they have the political cover to step forward and say: As a matter of fact, what Trump is doing is illegitimate, and we have to find the ways to stop him and remove him from power.

That can only be compelled from below. So every organization that took up No Kings Day, every organization that has struggled for Gaza, every organization that has done funding and transporting of women to get abortions and the abortion pill, everybody who has concerned themselves with rational education, everybody devoted to science, everybody who knows that as a matter of fact, the ending of Jim Crow and civil rights legislation was not an atrocity, but a positive advance that was won through struggle, and does not and should not be allowed to be reversed.

Everybody who has ever fought on any of these fronts, we have to come together, and we have to be in D.C., November 5, standing up together. We can do it under the same umbrella, we can have different tents, we can have different camps, we all have to be there — the one year anniversary of Trump’s election — saying: He is illegitimate and we will not let him and his fascist regime and his fascist, rabid social base, who have been in the streets in recent days saying: white men fight back — a genocidal rallying cry — being there together, all of us who are against this. We don’t want to let them have the future. We have to manifest. So we need to go out, and we cannot have any preconceptions. We have to reach out and extend a principled invitation.

We should be having, soon, very big mass organizing meetings where we’re calling people forward, if we get this call to action out in the thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands, like we need to. We should invite these representatives of these other organizations — come and be part of hosting these meetings with us, work on this with us. This is the only hope that humanity has to stop the consolidation of fascism in this country with all the horrors. We are not gonna get a second chance. This is happening now, and the last week’s events accelerated it dramatically. So it’s all hands on deck, and everybody’s invited in.

We have to have large mindedness and principle, and we’re going to have to learn to work with people with whom we have a lot of disagreements. This is never gonna happen if we only work with people we agree with. That doesn’t mean you don’t talk about your differences, you explore them, but you remember, what do we share. The future that I want and the future that you want and the future that they want, even if there’s big differences between them, unless you want that white supremacist, ethnically cleansed, genocidal fascist America, the future you want is not going to be possible if we don’t come together and drive this regime, nonviolently, from power.

So that’s where we come together. Then, there’s a lot to sort out together in that process. We need to have principle, where we actually seek to build unity on the basis of our common interests against this fascism, and not to tear each other down, not to divide where it doesn’t belong, and to raise differences when we have them to the people involved, not to rumor and snark and all of this, and to raise differences with the spirit of solving them, because humanity needs this from us. We really, really need to model the principle and the methods of working together that measure up to the enormous stakes for humanity, and the biggest interests we have to have in our hearts to come together and wage this fight. S
o our orientation is to work with other groups. We have been reaching out from a national level. We need to reach out more. This is in your hands as much as it’s in our hands. Take the call, and if there’s people who want to volunteer to help, we could use a team that is doing nothing but reaching out, following up, phone calling, DMing people. This needs to get to everybody.

Andy Zee 46:42

This is very important. One thing is we have to extend really big arms to people. There’s two things that we have to understand and we have to convey. One is we have to go back to what it is we’re facing. There will be no making peace with fascism — what is coming, the kinds of restrictions that will happen. When you don’t resist fascism, you are making peace with the great horror. I do remember, during the Vietnam War, there were many marches that had contingents of Buddhist, I’m gonna call them preachers, who would march with their drums and their processions because they understood the necessity to act on their beliefs. That’s one thing.

The question of what comes after. One thing is, you do at a certain point, have to say: What comes after, not resisting this and trying to stop it is a great horror. But there’s no space to even talk about what comes after if we don’t stop it now. We do have to get out there and say the essential thing: This is fascism. This is what it means. It’s going to be an unbelievable horror for humanity, including people in this country, if this succeeds. There is the possibility of defeating it. If we defeat it, then it’s a new ball game. Then there’s gonna be possibility. People have said, what’s brilliant about this is it’s a single demand. This can unite very broadly, what we’re doing. We need to come out in our millions, and we need to drive this regime from power by what we do.

Coco Das 48:09

Maybe we could talk about campuses for a second; the atmosphere of fear around academia, the way that colleges and educational institutions are being targeted. At the same time, college campuses have been a hard nut to crack. Many students are scared in the wake of the repression against the anti-genocide protests. How people understand that this is real. What is our role in making it known that there is a there, there?

Sunsara Taylor 48:40

On the on the campuses and the fear, people are losing their jobs, people are being driven from the academy, people are being blacklisted, people are being doxed and gone after. It is a chilling time. The president of George Mason, is being personally targeted by Trump, in large part because he’s a Black man. Trump is going after the academy as a whole, but they are trying to cripple and break the university system in this country, and they are trying to remake it. They have fascist alternate institutions.

There’s been a debate for a long time among some of these fascists — are we trying to take over the elite campuses, or are we trying to break them and destroy them and build alternate institutions? Whichever model they go for, they’re going for the kill. So I’m not gonna pretend that the stakes are not high. Actually, what that underscores is our only chance is if we all move together. And frankly, if what you’re seeing on the campuses, you see it in the sciences and in medicine and the hospitals and the CDC, the same thing is going on. What you see in every sphere, and publishing, and what you see across the board, that is why we call it fascism.

That is why we have to do something that is not normal. So yes, people have to have each other’s backs, but the whole point is, standing up one by one, people are gonna continue to get picked off. They’re gonna be made an example of. That’s the way fascism advances. It targets one person, it takes them down, or a whole section of people, and by breaking them, it terrorizes everybody else into silence. The only way you get off that escalated descending to the greatest depths of horror, is by coming back and saying: No, we’re not gonna cower. We’re going to stand up to this. And then by standing up, and the more it can be done collectively, you inspire the backbone of others. We know there were 16 million people who protested the police murder of George Floyd and the blatant white supremacy bound up with that.

There were millions of young people, many of whom are now in their 20s and 30s, who walked out for the climate, and all that is being bulldozed right now. There are hundreds of thousands of women and others who protested the overturning of Roe v Wade and abortion rights, and millions more who felt it like a gut punch. Somebody would have to do a survey, but I would wager at least 80% of academics know that what Trump is doing to the universities right now, weaponizing a false definition of antisemitism; if you criticize the State of Israel, then you can be accused of being antisemitic — even if you’re Jewish and you’re making clear you’re not criticizing people for being Jewish, you’re criticizing the policy of a genocidal government.
Trump made that the definition of antisemitism and is weaponizing it and getting people fired behind it. Everybody knows that when you say you are not allowed to put forward, and argue for, with substance and fact and data behind it, a political position for threat of losing your job, your livelihood, or maybe being disappeared if you’re a foreign student and put in a concentration camp, that violates the very premise and principle of academic freedom, and the whole mission of a university. So even people who are supporters of the State of Israel, some of them recognize this, and are speaking out against this.

There are so many people, not just radical people, so many people, who are professionals, who’ve lived their lives toeing the line and not thinking that much about politics, whose life mission in the academy and the sciences and medicine and civil service and other ways, are being violated and perverted and turned into fascist instruments of atrocity — the institutions that they’re working in. All those people need to be shaken and reached and woken up to act together. The fascists are not the only ones who could upset a campus and change terms.

We’ve seen this too. We’ve seen in the 1960s when the radical and liberation minded, Black liberation, anti-Vietnam War, women’s liberation, all these things had the initiative, and people who were opposed to it were on the defensive. We saw that as recently as 2020 with the Black Lives Matter struggle. We’ve seen it with the Gaza struggle, where the students rising up against a putrid genocide, had the initiative and were setting terms, and that was putting the rulers on the defensive. That was under Biden.

This can happen again — not each of those things in those forms, but the social base of people who could stand up to say: No, we’re not going to let our university capitulate; No, we’re not going to let you pick off one after the other; No, we’re going to have their backs and we’re going to protest, and if you the president of the university or the administration, in some other way want to cower to this, we’re going to do a vote of no confidence and get you out. The fascists are not the only people who can drive out a university president. The people have to get some backbone and understand that if you want others to be strong, you’ve got to be strong yourself.

You’ve gotta stand up against this and organize your peers, your colleagues, the people that you work among, who know that it doesn’t get better by being silent, it gets worse. Yes, there’s risk involved, but people need to stand up to this, and most of all, we need to link this to November 5, when we come together, all of us — yes, October 18th, No Kings Day, we need to link it to that too — massive protest, it should be a big building block. It should be as strong as it can be, and give backing an initiative again to our side. Remember how good it felt June 14 and the day after, when we saw 5 million people in the streets and everybody knew: Oh, we’re not alone. Think about that.

October 18th needs to be another day like that, and then November 5th, it needs to be massive nonviolent convergence on D.C. in a way that is demanding the fall of the Trump fascist regime. We are more than them in our numbers, so we have to actually fight for that, and we have to model it ourselves, and we have to rally others with the same. It looks like, Andy, you might want to add something to that.

Andy Zee 54:19

Just to follow up on this. There’s a lot of different ways people are expressing — we’ve got to build up the muscles first. By what mechanism are they gonna remove him from power? You can’t do this. There’s all kinds of things here of what we can’t do. People say that it won’t do any good. We don’t have the power. People don’t have the power. You did some agitation there since our about bringing people back to the George Floyd protest just five years ago. But I have to say to people: You don’t know that, that we don’t have the power. In fact, you’re looking at things just in terms of very immediate, direct experience, and not actually looking at:

One, the problems that these people who are running things have. They don’t have this all locked up. Even among the fascists. They’ll get a little bit united around the assassination of Charlie Kirk, but there’s divisions within them; they’re very sharp, even as Trump is on a roll — the divisions between them and the Democrats, all kinds of divisions at the top. If the people unite, they have tremendous power. We’ve seen it before in history. We’ve seen regimes — not often — driven out. I gave the example of Brazil. There is a different president there now. He actually served time in jail. This fascist leader locked him up. People have power. Listen to Patti Smith’s song, The People Have the Power.

Maybe it’ll help you, inspire you to see you don’t know that we don’t have the power, because you’ve seen it before. Go watch a film about the Arab Spring and Tahrir squares — a film called The Square. Yes, they didn’t win, but that’s something we can also discuss and analyze. There come times when things are so extreme that your choice is only: One, to live with it and maybe die by it, just by the workings of a fascist regime. Trump made a joke, which wasn’t such a joke, that his main advisor, Stephen Miller — He said, Stephen Miller won’t be happy till there’s only 100 million people in this country.

This guy, Kirk, had a campaign to kick ten million people out. Let me just read this quote from Trump’s statement after Kirk’s murder. He said: “Those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie Kirk to Nazis in the world’s worst murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.” If you read that sentence carefully, he’s talking about speech that’s actually accurate being treated as supporting terrorism. He’s saying: “My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”

We don’t do any of the things that are directly charged here, but this is casting a vague but wide net. This is not the world that anybody wants to live in. Somebody raised a question: If we were facing fascism, you wouldn’t be able to protest. Well, you might not be able to protest much longer. I think there’s a question a lot of people are writing here, going out to social movements that have been very accustomed to a certain way this country has been run. Yes, people get arrested, they get kettled and all kinds of things and, but ultimately, people continue their lives. This is not that. Fascism is not that. This is something we have to drive home to people, and we have to give them, also, the hope and the possibility and the means.

When faced with the upsurge and the uprising of millions of people in Washington, and then it would spark it around the country. Then they have the power, the backing behind them and the opportunity. Then you could see things start to shift and move. It’s happened before. It’s a different situation now, but in my lifetime, I’ve seen two presidents driven from power, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. This can happen. When you face something like fascism, people have to have the seriousness to want to read a statement about how we could get out of this.

This is serious business, and fascism is illegitimate. He’s already violated the law, the Constitution, human decency, integrity, truth, morality. There isn’t anything about this that you should want to or actually will be able to live with.

That’s number one. Number two, there’s millions of people out there who hate it too; deep in their heart, they abhor it. Three, there’s a plan, an approach. It’s concentrated in this call. You owe it to humanity, if not to yourself, to read this and to respond to it, and then do what needs to be done. Then, if people are serious, it’s time to make your plans. Get on the bus, reserve the plane, walk, ride your bike. I don’t care how you get here. Get here. If you can’t come for some reason, organize it in your city. This is serious business. This is your future, your kids futures. This is the future of the kids in Africa who are dying by the tens of Thousands because of the canceling of USAID to countries around the world — countries that they destroyed. This is serious.

We can’t take no for an answer, because it matters for the future. So it’s fascism. It’s illegitimate. There’s no living with it. There’s a way out of it. You need to be part of it, as do millions of other people. Now let’s find a way for everybody to get together and do this. I think when people are together, they’ll develop new ways of actually cooperating. When people raise their heads up and see that it’s possible that we have the strength to actually determine the future, it’s gonna change everything. This is the best thing you’ll ever do with your life. And if you don’t do it, you’re gonna live the worst life possible. You will be somebody who’s either directly attacked by fascism or you will be one of those people who did nothing when the future of humanity was on the line, and you tried to get by.

That’s shameful, and your children grandchildren, if there are any, will not thank you for it. They’ll do what others have done, hide their parents or their grandparents history, who collaborated with the Nazis — whether in Argentina, in Chile, Italy or Germany. History is filled with that kind of stuff. But it’s also filled with people rising up, and that’s what we’re going to do in non violent mass protests in our millions, sustained and we’re going to drive this regime from power. We have to do this, or else the future is going to be abysmal. So why don’t we fight for a great future?

Coco Das 1:00:38

Okay, I think on that note, get plugged in with us. Send us your questions, your ideas. Send us photos, videos, and we’re going to be announcing a public forum that’s gonna be coming soon. So good night everybody, and we will see you in motion. Good night. [AZ and ST: Goodnight.]

Sam Goldman 1:00:57

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. Become a patron to keep the podcast going and growing. Join today at Patreon.com/RefuseFascism. We are so glad to give a production level shout out to Tara Bergschneider, thanks for your support. Follow us, @RefuseFascism, including on Bluesky and on Tiktok @RefuseFashizm, where ‘Fascism’ is spelled F-A-S-H-I-Z-M. For resources on building for November 5th, see the show notes, or visit RefuseFascism.org where you can also sign up to commit to be in D.C.

Thanks to Richie Marini and Lina Thorne for producing the show. Until next time: In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America!

IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY, WE REFUSE TO ACCEPT A FASCIST AMERICA!

NOW IS the TIME WHEN WE MUST RISE UP and ACT to STOP the CONSOLIDATION of TRUMP MAGA FASCISM. For the lives of people here and around the world we must refuse unlawful and inhumane orders… we must fill the streets and town squares in non-violent protest—not stopping until we become millions — not relenting until this regime is no longer able to implement its program or maintain its hold on power.

Volunteer

Donate

The Danger Grows — So Must the Movement to Drive Trump Out

IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY, WE REFUSE TO ACCEPT A FASCIST AMERICA!

Contact Us

Take Action

Join Our Upcoming Webinar