It's not everything, but it's one thing.

 

Happy to be out Saturday with a few million of my closest friends. Thanks to everyone who joined in. See you next time!

Save America Rally

When the Nazis came for the communists, I kept quiet; 

I wasn't a communist.

When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet;
I wasn't a trade unionist.

When they locked up the social democrats, I kept quiet;
I wasn't a social democrat.

When they locked up the Jews, I kept quiet;
I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me, there was no one left to protest

—Martin Niemöller


Marc Elias, lawyer and voting rights expert, Democracy Docket founder, referenced Niemöller's poem earlier this month and said something that I've often thought about and one thing I don't remember ever thinking about before. Elias reminded his viewers of what is often thought of as the central message of the poem, that "It is important that you stand up not just when it is threatening you..."

Then he talked to and about people who have ignored the present crisis, have pretended it's got nothing to do with them, who have been telling themselves that everybody does this shit and "It's just politics," people for whom opposing the Trump regime has been too onerous or pointless or scary, and Elias asks, "Are we just too early in the poem?"

If you haven't been in the fight because you think it's about someone else and it's their fight, please take a look around and see how deep into the poem we are already, and think about what the end of it looks like. 

It's already too late to stop some troops from invading some of our cities, to stop some thousands of people from being kidnapped and disappeared into gulags here and abroad, and too late to prevent some hundreds of families from being devastated.

It's already too late to protect some hundreds of students from being damaged, detained, and/or deported because of their political views.

It's already too late to keep some tens of thousands of public employees from losing their jobs, too late for some kids who have already died because food and medicine was halted or withheld, too late to dodge state censorship, too late to avoid tariff inflation, too late to keep the Justice Department from becoming Trump's private vigilante enforcer. 

But it's not too late for the rest, the people who haven't yet been fired or kidnapped or silenced or killed. It's not too late for the people who are about to be thrown out or priced out of their health insurance and the healthcare it pays for. It's not too late to push back, to oppose this regime and the destruction of our democracy.

If you haven't been in the fight up until now, maybe because it's a lot of work and you think it hasn't touched you yet, it will. Look closer and I think you'll see it already has. 

If you haven't been in the fight because you don't know what to do, there are lots of lists out there if you look. Here's some of the things we've been doing:

• Call the electeds whose job it is to fight for us. You might say this is pretty old-fashioned, but these are old fashioned people with thinking stuck in 1980. It just might work with them.
• We can stop giving money to politicians who won't fight and give it to those who will.

We can stop supporting 

• Companies who are in on it, who give to inauguration committees and buy up meme coins. 
• Companies that print lies because the truth is too dangerous and the lies are so profitable. 
• Companies that smile and say "Thank you, Sir. May I have another?" just so they can hold on to their little piece of what they used to have and have betrayed so completely.
• Companies who accept contracts to build concentration camps, and who buy slaves from them to come pick their strawberries.

• We can stand outside federal buildings and ICE motels and detention facilities and shout.
• We can shout and whistle and video the goons when they show up.

There are lots of people writing good stuff about how to resist and, ultimately, build an opposition.

And you know what else we can do? We can MARCH! 

Trump seems poised to invoke the insurrection act over a rebellion that does not exist. It is fabricated, a fever dream of the Borg collective that includes Noem, Miller, Homan, Bondi and of course, Trump. Maybe Trump thinks it's a rebellion against the United States of Trump. Nevertheless, he thinks he's the king, the country, the world, and he thinks he can do whatever he wants to protect himself from those who disagree and oppose him.

That, of course, means more military troops patrolling more U.S. cities, making arrests and canceling the First Amendment. That won't mean we will lose the ability to protest. It means we will have lost the right to. But we haven't lost it yet. Even though the Trump regime is trying to take it away, and some of us are content to give it away, it's not gone. Not yet. 

So come on out. What are you waiting for? If you hate everything that's going on right now, come out. If you have one pet peeve, one thing about the way the Government is behaving that really grinds your gears, come out. If you have heard that we're all antifa or Hamas, BLM terrorists, Marxists, whatever, and you don't want to take Mike Johnson's word or Stephen Miller's word for it, come out and see for yourself. 

If all you are hearing is that this is a "Hate America Rally," a dangerous free-for-all full of dangerous people, first of all change the channel. 

First, don't be scared. If you can't do that, at least remember that they are ten times more scared than you are. You can tell from the overheated screeching and name-calling. They have staked everything on this authoritarian takeover. They know they are wrong and we are right. They know what their lives will be like if they lose. Ask yourself, "Why are these guys, Mike Johnson and the rest, pro-King?"  

Imagine what Thomas Paine and his buddies might have thought in this moment. Imagine what they would have done. Never mind, we don't have to imagine. "No Kings" is about the most American idea there is. 

Wherever you are in the country, there is arally within driving distance. (Click here for a map and more information.) Now is the time to stand up and stand against the king and for the country we want to be.

If you've heard about Stalin, or Mussolini, or Hitler and wondered what you would have done at the time, you're doing it now. If you're in downtown L.A., I'll see you there. You know what to do.

***

And don't forget: As of this writing we can still vote. In California, Prop 50 allows the legislature to temporarily redraw congressional districts in response to Republican gerrymandering. It levels the playing field for the time being. Voting now makes voting later meaningful--even possible--in 2026 and in 2028. Please vote. Act now, before it's too late.

Because, as the saying goes, you can't vote out a dictator. 

One good thing.

In my last post, which was a while ago, I wrote: : "There is a real, if messy, pro-democracy movement in the United States. The official leadership of the Democratic Party just isn't part of it. We need new management."

Some things have changed since then, and some things haven't. Democratic leadership did rise to this particular occasion by (so far) refusing to strike a shitty, illusory deal, and instead allowing  Republicans to shut down the Government and at least symbolically "defund" the murder mayhem machine. True, the regime is stealing funding approved by Congress for other purposes and redirecting it to their Secret Police and other favored horrors, but that's them breaking the law. As I've written before, there is value in forcing them to break the law in order to do the things they want to do.

Also, I still think the "health care health care health care" strategy is limited and could, under a more strategic regime, box the Dems into providing votes for a phantom deal. However, it is working right now and the Government is "unfunded" as we speak. It's not a perfect plan, but anything that makes dictatorship more difficult for them is worth doing. Sand in the gears, resist at all levels, make it hurt. And we know it's causing Mike Johnson and Republicans at least some pain because the Republican shutdown has got them pretending to care about someone else's pain, in this case the people they are not paying and the people they are throwing out of their jobs altogether.

So let's put this to rest right now: Every single one of the firings we are seeing was written on Project 2025 stone tablets well before Trump2 stumbled into the now-gold-plated office. 

Democrats should reset their talking points to include: 

1. Republicans run the entire Government. If Government isn't running, it's the Republicans not running it. 

2. Republicans blaming Dems for the firings of workers or shuttering of agencies or impending plane crashes is fucking ridiculous. The destruction they are visiting on the country--including the illegal firings--was inevitable once Trump was re-elected.

Republicans and so-called Conservatives have been working on and planning to and salivating over gutting the federal government for years. Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 was in the works in 2022, and its little brother, Trump's Agenda 47, oozed out of the cesspit the next year (Go back and take a look if you have the stomach for it; yes, he did in fact tell us exactly what he planned to do. Anyone pretending they "didn't vote for this" is either lying, delusional, or too stupid to live free. And anyone pretending that the pretenders aren't pretending should not be listened to). Grover Norquist joined Ronald Reagan's "Government is the problem" team in the 1980's. Point is, this is a decades-long project and Dems got nothing to do with it.

There is literally NOTHING any of us can NOT do that will keep them from doing what they want to do, intend to do, have already planned to do anyway. They will never stop. We will have to DO THINGS to stop them. 

And any Democrats wobbling over ridiculous Republican accusations (every accusation is a confession) or soggy "Won't Democrats pay a price?" questions from NewsBots or pointing fingers at other Dems for being too much or not enough, should be fired into the sun and replaced with humans who understand the war we're fighting and the battlefield on which we're fighting it.

So we have done this. We have called and written our leaders and they have, so far, stood strong in this one battle. We'll see about tomorrow.