No Kings Voter Mobilization _ Voto Latino

A note from an ally.

The organization I lead, Voto Latino, is proud to join MoveOn and other coalition partners for No Kings: Vote Early on October 17. This No Kings will focus on you and your local communities as more than 2,000 events are planned across the country to organize people to vote early. 

When you cast your ballot with friends and family, you're sending the biggest message possible: You can come here, you can vote safely. You can join us and celebrate the power of your vote. 

Join your neighbors at one of the 2,000 events taking place on October 17 to vote early.

For many weeks and months, we've heard how this administration has been trying to put its thumb on the scale. They have threatened to have federal agents at polling places. They've tried to spread fear and lies about the integrity of our elections. They're trying to change the rules at the last minute, like keeping you from voting by mail, which didn't work.

And that's thanks to a lot of people who are ensuring that your vote matters. But these are the types of shenanigans we're up against. These are the types of tactics designed to make sure that you stay at home. We don't want you to stay at home. There should be no reason for you to stay at home and not do what you have the right to do, which is to vote.

Put those shenanigans on the side and just know that there's a whole movement that has your back. We’re in this together, and you are guaranteed your freedom and your right to vote.

First, find a No Kings: Vote Early event near you on October 17. Second, make your voting plan today. Check your registration to make sure it’s up-to-date. Third, bring someone with you. Or bring many people with you and make sure that you go out big October 17 and beyond to vote early. And be sure to follow MoveOn and Voto Latino to stay connected through November and beyond.

Join us on Saturday, October 17, as we take our power to the polls and vote early.

My father used to tell me: Your little contribution of a grain of salt into something much bigger makes a difference. It's part of something bigger. So do your little part. And just knowing that you contributed that little piece is incredible.

It’s a force multiplier too, because of that little grain of salt, everybody's putting something into it and it becomes this mass movement that is a vast change that inspires so many other people.

What keeps me going is knowing that I'm not alone. When I see my fellow No Kings folks coming out strong, that means I'm not alone. We’re stronger together. Join us this Saturday, October 17 as we head to the polls to vote early!

Thanks for all you do.

–Beatriz Lopez, Voto Latino

Sacramento events

NO KINGS: VOTE EARLY DAY OF ACTION: All day. Nationwide with lots of local events here in the Sacramento area. The goal here is to encourage historic levels of EARLY VOTING. This is the low-hanging fruit of election protection: If your vote is in and counted, it’s very hard for Trump/ICE/MAGA to meddle. Early voting is a safe and easy way to protect this election. There are visibility events, ballot parties, honk and waves — something for everyone. (Note: DO NOT GO TO THE CAPITOL – there is no large protest this time and you will only find people setting up for IRONMAN!) GO TO NOKINGS.ORG TO FIND AN EVENT NEAR YOU.

10/17 – NO KINGS: VOTE EARLY EVENTS SPONSORED BY INDIVISIBLE SACRAMENTO: See above — we’re part of the nationwide day of action to get everyone to vote early. Indivisible Sacramento is focusing in on visibility events — banner drops and corner protests. 

BANNER DROP I-5 & SUTTERVILLE

BANNER DROP HWY 99 & 5th AVE OVERPASS

HONK AND WAVE AT TRUXEL & GATEWAY BLVD

The Folsom Democratic Club is doing an exceptional job on these events. 

For more information. Go to.

https://linktr.ee/INDIVISIBLESAC

 

Election day is November 3, but voting in California starts NOW! There are a few ways you can submit your ballot on or before Election Day:
1. Return by mail. Put it in your mailbox or visit any USPS location.
2. Drop it in an official Ballot Drop Box.
3. Bring it to a Vote Center or vote in person! Find the closest Vote Centers here: https://www.lavote.gov/.../find-my-election-information

  

Trump is a Traitor

 

Trump is a Traitor 

There is a war in Europe between Russia and Ukraine.  The U.S. sided with Ukraine and supplied Ukraine until Trump was elected.

Russia is a totalitarian state led by Vladamir Putin.  The Republic of the Ukraine is a democracy currently under attack from Russia Thousands are  dying. 

Now Trump has reversed course and supports Putin and Russia. He claims to represent the United States in this betrayal. 

Trum sides with Putin.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/09/us/politics/trump-russia-diesel-putin.html?

Trump betrays democracy while making finance deals to enrich his allies. 

Trump and MAGA have betrayed democracy by starting an unnecessary  war against Iran.

He has betrayed the American people by taking food from children and health care from the elderly.  We did not vote for this.

He has betrayed democracy by claiming there is fraud in the coming election. This could be preparation for a coup.

Today he has sent DHS police into the home of Congresswoman Ilahn Omar. ( Min.)   This is what fascists do. 

For these reasons, and many more, Putin and the  Trump/MAGA Fascist forces must be defeated in the November elections. 

Vote November 3. The future of our nation depends upon your vote.

Duane Campbell 

End Times for Fascism

 Excellent interview. 

Please post reviews.

Naomi Klein, End Times Fascism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHDwQ6FuWCs

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LATINO Book Festival

 

We Deserve Democratic Education

 The only reference to public schools in DSA’s Workers Deserve More program is a line pledging “free quality public education,” without explaining what “quality” might mean. At a time when MAGA is spreading reactionary ideas of what young people should learn, DSA needs to pay much more attention to this issue. 

Workers Deserve More calls for “a real democracy” in a “new political system” and “democratic control” of the economy. This assumes the American people are well-versed in the democratic ideals, values, and practices needed to actively and intelligently participate in such a society. Today this is obviously not the case. Maintaining a democratic socialist society will require a citizenry with a democratic socialist consciousness. The institutions most likely to build that consciousness, at least for the next generations, are public schools. It’s time for DSA to develop thoughtful, detailed proposals for how to restructure — indeed, revolutionize — the public education system to produce a generation of young people prepared to make all this democracy work.

Fortunately, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We just need to go back to the future and take a new look at the largely forgotten, misunderstood, and politically suppressed revolutionary pedagogy of the early twentieth-century progressive education movement. The movement’s founding father was the renowned educator John Dewey (1859–1952), a democratic socialist. His classic work, Democracy and Education, first published in 1916, laid out the principles of progressive education. 

Dewey envisioned schools not as places set apart to learn lessons, but as laboratories of democracy, with the curriculum organized entirely around democratic values. He advocated making the outside community a classroom. Education would no longer be rote instruction of academic subjects. Instead, teachers would connect it to students’ life experiences in their home communities as a foundation for learning basic skills, and a basis for actively exploring and understanding the world around them. 

Discussion and debate would be classroom practice. Students would be encouraged to question and challenge, and to advance their own suggestions about how to examine and test what they were studying, inside and outside the classroom. This would ultimately empower students and give them a sense of collective responsibility and personal involvement in the life of the school. They would work together to develop their abilities and talents and to understand they had the right and responsibility to apply what they learned to change conditions around them for the better.

Dewey and his daughter had previously published an illustrated book, The Schools of To-Morrow [sic], that described what the school curriculum should look like if the goal was education for life in a democratic society. The Deweys rejected focusing on the “Three R’s” and dividing the curriculum into separate academic subjects. They approvingly presented an example from what they called an “experiment” in Fairhope, Alaska: The usual curriculum was to be replaced with “physical exercise, nature study, music, hand work, field geography, storytelling, sense culture, fundamental conceptions of numbers, dramatization, and games.” Out of this would come, in its own time, knowledge of those “three R’s.” The charming pictures in this book depict students working in groups at all kinds of hands-on activities inside and outside the classroom, including building their own school, thereby creating a direct connection between their studies and the real life of the community.

This approach required a rethinking of theories of how children learn. Boyd H. Bode (1873-1953), a professor of education at Ohio State University and a disciple of Dewey (and a clearer, more readable writer), discussed this in several books, including How We Learn (1940). After presenting sophisticated critiques of dominant approaches to learning, he proposed instead what he called “pragmatic education,” which would establish student experience as the basis for learning. The task of the school, he said, is “to modify or ‘reconstruct’ the background of experience which the pupil brings with him … our chief reliance in this connection is on thinking.” The point would be to help students navigate new experiences in real life. Education becomes dynamic rather than static. 

To Bode, democracy was a matter of cooperation, respect, and mutual understanding among divergent groups to achieve a better social order. So then “the task of democratic schools is to develop individual capacity with a specific reference … to the issue of democracy as a way of life. The life of the school should embody this .., the school is a form of social living, in which every pupil has both rights and responsibilities … it is precisely this spirit of democracy for which the schools must assume specific responsibility — in the organization of school life, in community relations, and in the promotion of insight or understanding of the meaning of democracy.”

How Monopoly Fascism Came to Power : Nazis and Trump

 https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/82/how-monopoly-fascism-rose-again/

Trump Hides the Truth

 

An Architecture of Ignorance

Gas prices were hovering just below $3 a gallon in late February before Donald Trump decided to attack Iran. Due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the national average peaked in early May near $4.50, a 50 percent increase. When Trump capitulated in June and paused bombing, the average price dropped to just above $4. With expectations of protracted conflict ahead, it’s now around $4.40. We know all of this because gas prices are public and easy to monitor, and because the AAA motor club keeps a well-respected calculator. We also know that fear of measurables—the price of gas, the cost of food, the stock market—is the primary, perhaps the only, discipline on Trump’s anti-democratic instincts. Numbers gave citizens ammunition to apply political pressure. That is what numbers are for. They show us where the problem is, and whether anything we did about it worked. But the numbers that matter most to a democracy are not as easy to track. Unemployment, educational attainment, what pollutes the air outside a chemical plant; this data needs to be primarily collected and distributed by the federal government. And over the course of his second term, Trump has systematically dismantled this capacity. He is building what we call an “architecture of ignorance,” and its cost is the slow disabling of democratic accountability itself. One of us is a historian, the other an engineer who spends his days inside the small discipline of observability, the science of inferring a system’s internal state from its outputs. The distinction that discipline draws is between monitoring and seeing. Monitoring tells you the server is powered on. Observability tells you whether it is doing its work as intended. A system that loses observability has not necessarily failed; rather, it has become unknowable. It may be running correctly, or it may have begun to fail an hour ago. From the outside, there is no way to tell. In airplane terms, an altimeter goes dark, and whether the aircraft is at 30,000 feet or 600 is a question that admits no answer until impact. That is how the systems analyst sees Trump 2.0. Monitors all over the place are going dark. The historian’s eye runs the other way, toward precedent. Societies that lose the ability to measure themselves rarely register the loss as it happens. They register it afterward, in the accumulated weight of consequences that only become legible once it is too late to do anything about them. Between the two of us, we are terrified by what we are watching. One of us can see the mechanism failing in real time; the other knows how this kind of story tends to end.

Fascists Oppose Literate People

The Banned Books Week Coalition encourages us to stand up for library staff, students, educators, writers, publishers, and booksellers by “Letting Freedom Read”

The forty-fourth annual Banned Books Week (BBW) takes place October 4 through 10 this year, but given the significant, sustained efforts to restrict what young people can read, Banned Books Week should likely be observed every week. We are living in a time of increased attacks on the free press, free speech, academic freedom, and the rights to read and know. This year’s BBW theme, “Let Books Be: Protect the Freedom to Read,” reflects these concerns.

A recently published five-year report compiled by the American Library Association (ALA), Book Riot, Florida Freedom to Read Project, and the Freedom to Read Project chronicled an explosion of book bans beginning in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The surge was the result of what they called “a full-blown, organized political movement” led by groups such as Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education. Censors have had the most success in Florida and Texas, where state legislatures have passed laws requiring schools to purge their libraries of books that attract complaints from parents. But they have increasingly targeted local school board positions across the country to embed members who advance their censorious policies.

While book challenges were once focused primarily on individual books or authors and were brought by concerned parents or family members acting on their own behalf, the past half-decade shows a shift to sweeping challenges from organized interest groups. These efforts have been successful in red states and beyond, which should alarm anyone who supports the right to read and learn.

According to Betsy Gomez, coordinator of the Banned Books Week Coalition, ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom “tracked 4,235 unique titles challenged in 2025, the second highest ever documented by ALA,” and “713 attempts to censor library materials and services, 487 of which targeted books.” In 2025, the ALA found that “92 percent of all book challenges were initiated by pressure groups, government officials and decision makers, up from 72 percent in 2024” and “less than 3 percent of challenges originated from individual parents.”

Tactics and Targets

Books being yanked off the shelves at schools around the country include a number of acknowledged literary classics such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, usually singled out for their violent or sexual content. But the most challenged books in recent years invariably tell stories about people of color or LGBTQ+ characters.

According to PEN America, public school libraries banned 3,743 unique titles during the 2024–2025 school year. Roughly 44 percent of those titles featured characters identified as people of color. Another 36 percent featured characters identified as LGBTQ+, and some 19 percent of the banned titles dealt with characters depicted as trans or genderqueer. A typical book targeted for featuring LGBTQ+ characters and themes is Malinda Lo’s Last Night at the Telegraph Club, a National Book Award-winning young adult novel about two women who fall in love in San Francisco’s Chinatown against the backdrop of the Cold War. According to PEN America, it was banned nineteen times in 2024–25.

Some books have been banned merely for acknowledging that the United States has a past marred by slavery, oppression, and exploitation, or for depicting struggles for social justice. For instance, Veronica Arreola’s J is for Justice: An Activism Alphabet, an illustrated picture book introducing youngsters to social justice activism, was one of nearly 596 titles removed from Department of Defense school libraries earlier this year. It was also removed from a Virginia school library.

Book banning at the K-12 level is bad enough, but increasingly brazen censors are also trying to restrict the sort of books that can be read in college as well. Early this year, Texas A&M University barred a philosophy professor from assigning an excerpt from Plato’s Symposium, his famous dialogue about the nature of love, because it allegedly contained “gender ideology.” The University of Nebraska at Kearney announced in June that it would discontinue the textbook Discovering Human Sexuality in courses after fielding multiple complaints from conservative critics, including Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen. The critics particularly bemoaned a training module in the book about empowering transgender students.

Although most of the book challenges around the country in the past few years have been perpetrated by right-wing groups and politicians, not all the titles being targeted are “progressive” or “woke.” For instance, two books by former Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly, about Jesus and Ronald Reagan, were removed from shelves in one Florida school district.

These extraordinary efforts to control student access to works about specific academic subjects or marginalized identities are problematic on their own, but a separate challenge exacerbates all of this: declining literacy and interest in reading.

A Decline in Literacy