The Resistance Starts Now !

 

The Resistance Starts Now

I still have faith in America, but we must mobilize to protect those at risk if Trump achieves his worst impulses.

ROBERT REICH

NOV 06, 2024

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Friends,

I won’t try to hide it. I’m heartbroken. Heartbroken and scared, to tell you the truth. I’m sure many of you are, too. 

Donald Trump has decisively won the presidency, the Senate, and possibly the House of Representatives and the popular vote, too.

I still have faith in America. But right now, that’s little comfort to the people who are most at risk.

Millions of people must now live in fear of being swept up by Trump’s cruel mass deportation plan – documented immigrants, as he has threatened before, as well as undocumented, and millions of American citizens with undocumented parents or spouses.

Women and girls must now fear that they’ll be forced to give birth or be denied life-saving care during an ectopic pregnancy or miscarriage.

America has become less safe for trans people – including trans kids – who were already at risk of violence and discrimination.

Anyone who has already faced prejudice and marginalization is now in greater danger than before.

Also in danger are people who have stood up to Trump, who has promised to seek revenge against his political opponents.

Countless people are now endangered on a scale and intensity almost unheard of in modern America.

Our first responsibility is to protect all those who are in harm’s way.

We will do that by resisting Trump’s attempts to suppress women’s freedoms. We will fight for the rights of women and girls to determine when and whether they have children. No one will force a woman to give birth.

We will block Trump’s cruel efforts at mass deportation. We will fight to give sanctuary to productive, law-abiding members of our communities, including young people who arrived here as babies or children.

We will not allow mass arrests and mass detention of anyone in America. We will not permit families to be separated. We will not allow the military to be used to intimidate and subjugate anyone in this country.

We will protect trans people and everyone else who is scapegoated because of how they look or what they believe. No one should have to be ashamed of who they are.

We will stop Trump’s efforts to retaliate against his perceived enemies. A free nation protects political dissent. A democracy needs people willing to stand up to tyranny.

How will we conduct this resistance?

By organizing our communities. By fighting through the courts. By arguing our cause through the media.

We will ask other Americans to join us – left and right, progressive and conservative, white people and people of color. It will be the largest and most powerful resistance since the American revolution.

But it will be peaceful. We will not succumb to violence, which would only give Trump and his regime an excuse to use organized violence against us.

We will keep alive the flames of freedom and the common good, and we will preserve our democracy. We will fight for the same things Americans have fought for since the founding of our nation – rights enshrined in the constitution and Bill of Rights.

The preamble to the Constitution of the United States opens with the phrase “We the people”, conveying a sense of shared interest and a desire “to promote the general welfare”, as the preamble goes on to say.

We the people will fight for the general welfare.

We the people will resist tyranny. We will preserve the common good. We will protect our democracy.

This will not be easy, but if the American experiment in self-government is to continue, it is essential.

I know you’re scared and stressed. So am I.

If you are grieving or frightened, you are not alone. Tens of millions of Americans feel the way you do.

All I can say to reassure you is that time and again, Americans have opted for the common good. Time and again, we have come to each other’s aid. We have resisted cruelty.

We supported one another during the Great Depression. We were victorious over Hitler’s fascism and Soviet communism. We survived Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts, Richard Nixon’s crimes, Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war, the horrors of 9/11, and George W Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We will resist Donald Trump’s tyranny.

Although peaceful and non-violent, the resistance will nonetheless be committed and determined.

It will encompass every community in America. It will endure as long as necessary.

We will never give up on America.

The resistance starts now.

 

  

Michelle Obama : Electing Kamala Harris

 Michelle Obama on Electing Kamala Harris.

 

On our blog.  Video.

 

https://www.dsanorthstar.org/blog/michelle-obama-full-speech-about-kamala-harris

Brighter Future | Harris-Walz 2024

How Refusing to Vote for Harris Could Bring Mass Immigrant Deportations to America

 

 

 

 

 

How Refusing to Vote for Harris Could Bring Mass Immigrant Deportations to America

Justifiable fury at the loss of innocent lives in Gaza shouldn’t lead to the destruction of millions of innocent lives here at home.

by Harold Meyerson

October 31, 2024

 

On our blog. 

 

https://www.dsanorthstar.org/blog/how-refusing-to-vote-for-harris-could-bring-mass-deportations-to-america

 

With polls showing that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are running even in nearly every swing state, this election will turn on the decisions of very small subsets of voters. One of those subsets surely isn’t contemplating voting for Trump, but may end up electing him anyway.

I refer to those voters so understandably appalled by Israel’s war on Gaza and the toll it’s taken in innocent lives that they may not vote, or vote for Jill Stein, as a way of protesting the Biden administration’s continued provision of arms for Netanyahu’s war, and Harris’s refusal to cleanly break with that policy.

It’s by no means clear how not voting for Harris will stop Israel’s destruction of Gaza and the attendant slaughter of innocent lives. It is perfectly clear, however, that it will imperil millions of innocent lives right here in the USA should it lead to a Trump victory.

 

I refer to the immigrants among us whose forced deportation is the fundamental plank in Trump’s platform, the one issue he stresses in every one of his otherwise disjointed speeches, the sine qua non of his pledge to make America great again. To accomplish that deportation, he’s made clear he’d order the National Guard to sweep through immigrant-heavy neighborhoods, and might well order the Army to clear out areas like the Bronx, East Los Angeles, and Chicago’s West Side as well.

  

Move On Launches Final Campaign Ad : Believe Him !

As first reported by CNN, yesterday MoveOn launched a seven-figure ad on the economy—the No. 1 issue in this election—with two partner organizations, the Working Families Party and Future Forward.¹

It's our closing argument before Election Day. We are making the final case to American voters that Vice President Kamala Harris is on the side of working people, while Donald Trump absolutely is not.

The ad is airing on streaming services in all seven battleground states and is targeting late-deciding, less political, working-class voters, as well as those voters who have been third-party curious. It can also be seen on YouTube.

It's a very large ad buy, but we had to do it—because this is the final stretch, and we're leaving everything on the field.

But here's the thing: We hadn't budgeted for this ad; we didn't think we'd have to do something like this so late in the game.

But this election is too close—and the stakes are too high—for us to sit this out.

It's critical that we reach on-the-fence voters, and this ad is how we'll do it.

We know that you'll be shocked by the cost of this ad. It's a seven-figure ad buy, but with all of the political spending in this election, that's what the going rate is. We couldn't have done it without crucial allies, and we wouldn't spend the money if we didn't think it had to be done.

Now, we urgently need additional funds for the final stretch to continue our other critical work to reach voters.We want you to watch the ad, but here's a preview:

Against the backdrop of powerful images, our ad says:

"Most of us work hard to care for the people we love and build a better life. But corporations are making record profits, getting richer off our backs, while we work harder. Kamala Harris will make sure we keep more of what we earn–cracking down on price gouging, lowering the cost of housing and prescription drugs, and making the rich pay their fair share in taxes. Vote Kamala Harris. She's with us. Not with them."

And it closes with an image of Trump and his billionaire buddy Elon Musk.

Before launching the ad, we tested it with voters in our target audiences, and it performed extremely well across everydemographic in each swing state.

The results blew us away. They were among the best we'd seen for an ad during this entire election cycle.

That's why we knew we HAD to launch this ad, with the help of crucial partners, at a massive, impactful, difference-making, seven-figure scale.

But we have crucial work we must continue in the final week, including ...

• Phone-banking more than one million voters
• Running microtargeted ad campaigns so that each voter sees the ad most persuasive to them across multiple digital channels
• Working in partnerhip with social media influencers
• Our community vote tripling program that helps voters reach out personally to their family and friends to remind them to cast a ballot. Studies show this program as much as five times more effective than traditional voter outreach; and
• Field organizers on the ground in battleground states who are running canvasses to reach the critical voters who will decide this election.

We can't afford to pull even a little bit away from this crucial work. Not even for this incredibly powerful ad campaign. So we're counting on you to help fill this funding gap for the final stretch.

The New York Times editorial board wrote powerfully on Sunday: "Donald Trump says he will prosecute his enemies, order mass deportations, use soldiers against citizens, abandon allies, play politics with disasters. Believe him."²

They used Trump's own words to outline his dangerous plans in each of these areas, repeating each time, "Believe him."

We believe him and know what he's capable of. And we know that the Trump-packed Supreme Court won't stop Trump. Remember, the Supreme Court ruled this year that Trump can't be prosecuted for crimes he commits as president.³

And we know that the political staff who held Trump in check—to an extent—in his first term have since abandoned him and are sounding the alarms about how dangerous he is. They have been replaced by MAGA die-hards who are endlessly loyal to Trump and will alway put him above us and our country.⁴

And that's why in these final five days before the election, we MUST do everything possible to get every left-leaning voter in the battleground states to the polls. But it's going to take all of us doing everything we can.

 If interested>>>>>>>Please rush a $9 donation now to help MoveOn have the resources for this final sprint to when the polls close on Election Day.

Thanks for all you do.

–Britt, Amanda R., Alyssa, Isbah, and the rest of the team

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American Fascism

by Henry Wallace. Former Vice President of the U.S. 1944.

The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way,” Wallace wrote in his landmark essay “The Danger of American Fascism,” published in The New York Times Magazine on April 9, 1944.

Wallace’s thoughts and words are even more relevant today than they were then. Here are additional excerpts:

A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions, or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends.…

The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.…

It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship. What we must understand is that the industries, processes, and inventions created by modern science can be used either to subjugate or liberate. The choice is up to us.…

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism.… They claim to be superpatriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interests.…

Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion.…

Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself….

Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

Wallace saw the connection between Hitler’s preachments about racial “purity” and the language of Southern segregationists who spoke of a master race. “Those who fan the fires of racial clashes for the purpose of making political capital here at home are taking the first step toward Nazism,” he warned. And “the second step toward fascism is the destruction of labor unions.”

To avert the rise of American fascism, Wallace argued that America must champion “the democracy of the common man,” embracing “not just the Bill of Rights but also economic democracy, ethnic democracy, educational democracy, and democracy in the treatment of the sexes.”