January 22 marks the 46th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion. Yet today the procedure is more stigmatized, more dangerous to provide, and more difficult to access than at any time since legal confirmation of women's reproductive freedom. This week, share our outrage that reactionary forces would undo decades of legal precedent, targeting San Francisco with their hateful vision of repression.
Organizers of the so-called "March for Life" will bus in tens of thousands of Christian fascists to march down Market Street, as they have for the last 14 years. We must mount a powerful counter-protest.
Saturday, January 26, defenders of reproductive rights will take to the streets to challenge the so-called "Walk for Life" sponsored by anti-abortion, anti-women fanatics.
Meet up 12:30 pm, Powell & Market, for a march to One Post Plaza.
A bold contingent of Handmaids will create a visual statement of opposition to the nightmare world of brutal and extreme subjugation of women so powerfully captured in the novel and TV show The Handmaid's Tale.
To dress as a 'Handmaid', contact afong@jps.net
Never shy about his misogynist convictions, Mike Pence's contempt for women's rights -- forcing women to bear children against their will -- constitutes a major component of all-around American fascism. His resistance to AIDs funding, persecution of LGBTQ people, and abuse of immigrant children reflect the Biblical foundation of a new newly created Religious Liberty Task Force.
Just last Friday the U.S. Vice President made a surprise appearance on stage to introduce President Trump's prerecorded video for The Right to Life Campaign's annual rally. "We know that every life has meaning," Trump said. The hypocrisy of that statement, in light of the Trump/Pence regime's largely uncontested bombing of civilians across the globe, would be hard to match.
We will NOT be silent in the face of hatred. We will NOT stay home as fascists parade through the streets. We will STAND UP for abortion rights, and CONFRONT & DEFEAT this war on women!
Join Refuse Fascism Bay Area and Revolution Books to STOP PATRIARCHY. End the Enslavement and Degradation of Women.
The Trump/Pence Regime was imposed on the citizenry of this country by the Electoral College, asserts Isabel Cardenas, Salvadoran-American activist and co-initiator of RefuseFascism.org. She further contends Trump needs to be removed because he and his regime divides people and promotes white supremacy like Nazi Germany, reported Wes Woods II to the Los Angeles Daily News.
"Demonization of immigrants is at the very core of the fascist program of Trump," charges Revolution Newspaper, "part of a whole thrust to 'make America white again.'" The whole program and mentality being promoted by the Trump/Pence regime must be thoroughly rejected and stopped.
Supporters will contribute this message to the Women's March San Francisco Saturday, January 19
World Can't Wait will Meet up with Refuse Fascism at 11:00 am
Civic Center Plaza, Larkin and Grove Street, San Francisco
Plan to March 1:30 pm to the Embarcadero
Leading Democrats don't disagree with the demonization and criminalization of immigrants, they object to the "bad optics" of a concrete border wall. "Contending forces of a capitalist-imperialist dictatorship" compete over who can better carry out the program of U.S. supremacy behind Trump's highly repressive assault on immigrants. What we need to fight for is a world without borders.
Trump Is As Much a Product of Our Country as Hitler and Mussolini Were of Theirs
"We didn't get into this fix by accident and we won't get out painlessly, if at all," argues History Professor Robert Zaller. "If Donald Trump was and is something unimaginable, we must also recognize the degree to which he was also inevitable." Fascism not only can happen in the U.S., it has happened here, says Zaller: "In Donald J. Trump, America now has its first fascist president."
Through an unrelenting barrage of daily outrages and twitter outbursts, the Trump/Pence regime is radically remaking society. Nothing short of removing the whole illegitimate Trump/Pence regime from power will stop this nightmare. Join us!
Mr. Trump's first Oval Office address felt like a non-event agree The New Yorker writers John Cassidy and Masha Gessen.
"A measure of how much has changed in two years -- how far we have fallen -- is that commentators have stopped saying that Trump is 'Presidential' when he manages to read from the teleprompter," says Gessen. "This isn't because Trump has changed or the commentators have changed. It's because he has redefined what 'Presidential' is."
Absent the impetus of the declaration of a state of emergency foreshadowed by political pundits, Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi countered Trump's demand for a border wall with Mexico with the moral-less stance that: 'It costs too much'. Instead of denouncing death in detention camps, the violation of human rights suffered by families in hieleras, or the kidnapping of children by agents of the U.S. government, Schumer and Pelosi choose to ally themselves with the President's position.
"Make no mistake," Schumer says, "Democrats and the President both want stronger border security." Facilitating the denial of international protection afforded asylum seekers desperate to escape untenable living conditions -- exacerbated by U.S. meddling in Latin American countries -- the shameless duo confer legitimacy to the genocidal policies of a fascist regime consolidating in full view of an immobilized citizenry of "leftist" or "progressive" persuasion.
We can't wait for Democrats to save us from this nightmare.
2018 has ended with two Guatemalan children dead in U.S. detention at the border, "their precious lives lost in the hands of this regime," writes RefuseFascism.com contributor Coco Das. "What do we owe those children, and the lives around the world hanging in the balance? Our mission today is as clear as it was when we began, to bring millions into the streets in a sustained, non-violent movement to demand, in the name of humanity, the Trump/Pence regime must go. There is much turbulence roiling above, but the waters down here are far too calm. There is only one kind of disorder a fascist regime fears, the disorder and disobedience of the masses of people. We must very soon take advantage of the divisions at the top with a massive disruption from below, to un-calm the waters on our terms and wrench a different future out of this turmoil."
Government suppression of scientific discovery has cast a gloomy pall of depression -- "climate trauma" -- on scientists and activists alike. And frank talk about the grim realities of a warming planet turns people off--it's simply too much to take in, suspects NASA's Gavin Schmidt. "The business-as-usual world that we project is really a totally different planet."
The physical evidence becomes more dramatic every year: forests retreating, animals moving north, glaciers melting, wildfire seasons getting longer, higher rates of droughts, floods, and storms -- five times as many in the 2000s as in the 1970s. In the blunt words of the 2014 National Climate Assessment, conducted by three hundred of America's most distinguished experts at the request of the U.S. government, human-induced climate change is real; U.S. temperatures have gone up between 1.3 and 1.9 degrees, mostly since 1970, and the change is already affecting "agriculture, water, human health, energy, transportation, forests, and ecosystems." -- John H. Richardson, Writer at Large for Esquire magazine
But "Crawling under a rock isn't an option," says climatologist Jason Box, "so becoming overcome with PTSD-like symptoms is useless." We must act NOW.
RefuseFascism.org works tirelessly to stop the crimes of our government; including the fascist war on truth, science, and the environment. Donate generously to the one movement with a plan and vision to drive out the climate deniers at its helm. Before it's too late.
The role of the dispassionate scientist is being severely tested by physical evidence that things are worse than we think. Climate scientists are rallying to counter the fossil-fuel propaganda campaign financed by carbon-intensive (coal, natural gas, and oil) companies and their sponsors. Science is and has always been political, says Space.com writer Miriam Kramer. "Science faces an existential threat under the current administration. While science isn't necessarily partisan in the best of times, the truth is looking more and more like a partisan issue these days."
"Individuals who have dedicated their lives to basic scientific research are not being taken seriously and are being portrayed as part of a larger conspiracy," notes paleontologist and science communicator Shaena Montanari. "The greatest damage caused [to society] will be the absence of a better future, one that we will never realize."
The Trump/Pence Regime poses a catastrophic danger to humanity and the planet, and it is our responsibility to drive them from power through non-violent protests that grow every day until our demand is met.
This caravan is not "seeking the American dream" but "fleeing the Honduras nightmare," says Jari Dixon, an opposition politician in Honduras.
Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" is a 21st century fascist program of Manifest Destiny - "America First" - wrapped in the flag and Mike Pence's Bible taken literally, with a program of white supremacy, misogyny, and xenophobia. -- Refuse Fascism 2018 Call to Action
U.S. intervention in Central American politics began with the overthrow of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, setting a pattern of military strongmen, juntas, and mass killings that continues to this day. Ryan Grim traces 60 years of those policies here. "Decades of Cold War gamesmanship," says Grim, "together with the relentless global war on drugs, have left a legacy of chaos and brutality in these countries. In many parts of the region, civil society has given way to lawlessness." A record number of unaccompanied children fleeing dire living situations indicates just how desperate the situation has become.
Migration is an imperative for hundreds of thousands of Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans in search of a better life. "The people who are currently fleeing Honduras are being forcibly displaced from their country," notes Pueblo Sin Fronteras activist Alex Mensing, "and that is a direct result of the corrupt Honduran government and U.S. intervention and support for that corrupt government." United Nation's special rapporteur Felipe Gonzalez Morales says that governments should respect migrants' human rights and allow them to pass, instead of criminalizing them and deporting them.
"Immigrants are full human beings, not 'illegals' or criminals, to be demonized, terrorized, hunted down, locked up, and thrown out," reads the headline of one Indictment of the Trump/Pence Regime by RefuseFascism.org. One of President Trump's first acts in office was an executive order targeting all 11 million undocumented immigrants for deportation, regardless of any supposed criminal record.
The collateral damage of America's increasingly unforgiving deportation process is that people are being returned to extremely dangerous situations in Central America, which has some of the highest murder rates in the world. -- see U.S. government deporting Central American migrants to their deaths
"Many of the minors who leave for the States are trying to escape being forcibly recruited into the gangs, or if they've already started working with the maras, leaving the country may be their only way out," says Honduras homicide detective Jaime Coto. But a return home makes them prime targets for gang retaliations. Between four and eight murders of deportees are reported by his team every day; the actual count is likely much higher.
Sibylla Brodzinsky reports on the tens of thousands of undocumented migrants sent home every year. "Their stories highlight the risks many deportees face on their return... returning home can mean death." This nightmare must end. Help wake and mobilize the one force that can stop terrorizing and attacking immigrants and refugees. There is a way to stop the Trump/Pence regime. A determined struggle of the people that doesn't yield and won't be provoked can create the kind of political crisis that compels their removal from power: We are talking about massive protests that don't end after one day - but come back day after day after day, growing to millions raising the demand: THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO!
No matter who wins the midterm elections, Trump and Pence retain power. That is an unacceptable reality for millions of disenfranchised Americans and exploited subjects around the world. In the Name of Humanity, the Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!
"Even with a 'best-case' scenario of Democratic wins, where do you truly expect us to be on the morning of November 7th?" asks Refuse Fascism volunteer Sarah Roark. "Other than more or less where we are now, only with less time on the clock?"
Fascism can come to power through the normal processes of elections and laws, but it cannot be removed from power in that way, says RefuseFascism.org. For nearly two years, the Trump/Pence regime has maneuvered through one shocking crime against the people after another, burying each under yet another monstrous offense. Refuse Fascism has indicted the regime in seven exhaustive lists. But there is a way to stop the Trump/Pence program of white supremacy, misogyny, and xenophobia.
Protest November 7, the day after the midterms, when the whole country will be thinking about life after elections. Donate and start organizing today -- while you still can -- to help wake and mobilize the one force that can stop a fascist America - millions of people in the streets saying: NO! This Nightmare Must End: We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America!
If you're not scared about fascism in the U.S., you should be, warns philosopher Jason Stanley. "When fascism starts to feel normal, we're all in trouble." These are not normal times. Muslims banned. Immigrant children languishing in concentration camps. White supremacy riding high. Women and LGBTQ people slammed backwards. Threats of nuclear war. Accelerated environmental destruction. A pro-fascist majority on the Supreme Court.
If Not Us, Who?
It's time to stop waiting for a hero, urges Roark. Playing for time only makes sense when you're expecting a rescue. "Think about it. Who do you think is coming to save us? Which movie hero are you waiting for to give you permission to step outside your boundaries and follow their shining leadership to where you already know you need to be? Is it Beto O'Rourke? Bernie Sanders? Elizabeth Warren? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Robert Mueller?"
The movement to drive out the dangerous and illegitimate Trump/Pence regime depends on ordinary people like you getting involved and doing things that perhaps you didn't think you were capable of. Refuse Fascism has the analysis, the understanding and a plan. See the Call to Action from RefuseFascism.org.
At a moment when the Trump/Pence regime's depraved and deliberate cruelty is continuing and escalating, it is critical that the Refuse Fascism Call to Action -- that diagnoses the existential threat to humanity posed by the Trump/Pence Regime and the only way to stop it -- reach millions. We can do this!
says Chris, a DACA recipient and activist with Refuse Fascism. "I was five years old when we crossed the border with my parents and my sisters. There were five of us. I remember riding piggyback on my dad's shoulders. He kept telling me we'd be fine, that everything would be OK if we could make it. He we kept praying with my mom, because we were worried about my sisters being raped."
Over time, Chris had acquired a kind of acceptance of immigration practice. "When I heard about DACA being ended, it didn't really make an impact on my life," he confesses. It took seeing children locked up in cages to decide to do something about it.Pre
The crimes of the Trump/Pence regime are many and varied, from kidnapping children to sexual-assault policy. The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is a concentration of why the Trump/Pence fascist regime must be driven from power.
"Any judge that is nominated and confirmed under the authority of this regime will create a pro-fascist majority on the Supreme Court, one that upholds and advances the fascist program and makes it the law of the land," writes Coco Das. "[Brett Kavanaugh] will be a rubber stamp on the policies of this regime and eliminate one channel that the people have used, especially in the past few decades, to guarantee their rights."
The Trump/Pence regime has not yet been able to implement their full program. But they are advancing. It might only take a single serious crisis - international or domestic - for this regime to drop the hammer.
Kavanaugh is not a done deal, and neither is this regime. Join us Thursday September 27 to STOP the Appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court! Rally and Speak Out 12:00 noon, One Post Plaza, corner of Montgomery & Market Street, San Francisco.
To dress as a 'Handmaid', contact afong@jps.net
We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America, in the streets, day after day, week after week. This regime must go, and we must not wait to act.
When Donald Trump belittled U.S. participation in the 21st United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, he set the stage to open the floodgates to $50 trillion dollars worth of shale, oil, natural gas and coal, recounts British reporter Charlotte Howes. "I think it's ridiculous," said Trump. "We have bigger problems right now... talking about global warming being the biggest problem facing this country is insane." The president and his cabinet prefer to rally around an illusory migration emergency.
"The people who say that immigration is the real problem are now from the government of the United States, they are saying that climate change is explicitly not a problem, that it's a hoax," says activist and author Andreas Malm. "What we see with Trump's [election] victory is... a convergence between the xenophobic agenda and the climate change denialist agenda."
Donald Trump has proved somewhat of an inspiration for street artist Andrew Colwill. "Trump really opens my mind for me. When I hear somebody being as stupid and ignorant as that man is when it comes to the environment, he makes me want to work even more," says the muralist. "I am the living reaction to what is happening at the moment with these ignorant, right-wing, fascist individuals."
The world is "at a fork in the road," he adds, which could end with either "survival of a smaller, wealthier population" or a sharing of the planet's resources by all of humanity.
"If we were all just a little more active and involved politically, we could change so many things," Colwill suggests. But it will take massive numbers of ordinary people getting involved and doing things that stretch their comfort zones to counter the institutionalized lying and enforced ignorance of existential threats to our planet.
Trump is using climate change as a weapon of genocide, warns Keep Colorado Green founder Matthew Barad. "I have concluded that the coming harm of Trump's climate policies are not the product of ignorance, but intentionality."
In the past, Barad compared Trump to Nero: "His opulence and ignorance seemed reflective of Rome's fall." But today he hears a much more sinister tune.
Trump's allies, from Richard Spencer to now-ousted Steve Bannon have an unmistakable Nazi streak. Spencer openly calls for a white ethno-state, and unapologetically blames ethnic diversity for the problems facing our world. Even Trump's "respectable" Republican allies regularly blame the poor for their poverty, and have even refused to provide blameless children with healthcare and food. This hatred for the poor and the diverse manifests itself in revocation of TPS for immigrants fleeing natural disasters, neglect of American citizens without homes, hope, or power, and the passage of legislation which systematically steals from the poor for the sake of the rich...
Trump, and those around him, are not only making climate change deadlier, they are ensuring that the "undesirables" are more vulnerable than ever before.
Musician and environmentalist Tim Hollo views climate change and fascism as two sides of the same coin: disconnection. "Climate change isn't 'just' an environmental issue... It will have enormous effects on where and how we live, on already difficult economic and racial justice challenges, on our economies, and much more. One under-appreciated aspect, however, is the impact it is likely to have on our politics."
What Hollo says he never expected was that "the relapse towards fascism might arrive well before the worst impacts of climate change." This reality demands we act now and act boldly. There truly is no time to waste.
Nothing short of removing this whole illegitimate regime from power will stop the advance of a vicious American fascism that threatens life on this planet.
The Florida legal term is akin to solitary confinement, employed as retaliation against prisoners participating in the latest prison strike against a system of mass incarceration that effectively perpetuates the racial caste system of twentieth century Jim Crow law.
Inmate resistance to the "modern slavery" of a prison labor system that forces them to work for as little as four cents per hour is growing. The nation-wide prison strike that launched August 21 (on the anniversary of the 1971 murder of George Jackson), confirmed in at least five Florida prisons, inspires complementary actions in prisons from North Carolina to California, reports Tarpley Hitt for The Daily Beast -- and statements of solidarity from 21 American cities and several foreign countries:
"Today, we extend our solidarity to the prisoners in the jails of the United States participating in the national prison strike beginning on August 21," wrote the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a group of imprisoned Palestinians in Israel. "Black communities, Latino communities, Arab communities are under attack, facing mass incarceration and a system that seeks to imprison and exploit rather than support and nurture youth and elders."
Prison Strike 2018 is a response to the April 15 uprising in Lee Correctional Institution, South Carolina. Seven inmates lost their lives in an institution-provoked riot. In addition to condemnation of indentured labor, prisoner demands address living conditions, life without parole, racial discrimination, health and rehabilitation care, financial aid for education, and voting rights.
"Prisoner demands... are taking their rightful place at the table in all conversations on how to begin to undo the atrocity that is mass incarceration in America," concludes the Prison Strike Media Team. "The prisoners' bold action must be followed up on the outside with policy changes and continuous conversations about living conditions and human rights abuse in the prisons."
2.3 million Americans, disproportionately Black and Latino, are incarcerated. RefuseFascism.org indicts the Trump/Pence Regime for White Supremacy, Police Brutality, and Mass Incarceration. Organizers have a plan to stop these and all the crimes of our government. World Can't Wait urges you to join them. A better world is possible.
Bay Area "Handmaids" assembled in downtown San Francisco Monday, August 13, to protest the Trump/Pence regime's theocratic war on women's reproductive freedom. Aggressive moves to criminalize abortion and assail women's right to birth control are key components of the thoroughly reactionary restructuring of society we are determined to stop -- before it is too late.
Sixteen volunteers in blood-red cloaks and white modesty bonnets -- costumes inspired by the popular Hulu TV series The Handmaid's Tale, based on Margaret Atwood's novel of the same title -- rallied at the Powell Street cable car turnaround at Market Street and marched, two by two, through Union Square, a major public square in San Francisco, to the 450 Sutter Street Support Circle anti-abortion clinic. Two Handmaids went up to the clinic, on the 17th floor, which was closed, and posted a statement from Refuse Fascism on the door. Three "pro-life" agitators failed to disrupt the demonstration.
Literally hundreds of people took pictures, videos, etc. of the procession of Handmaids through this high-end shopping and tourism part of San Francisco. Refuse Fascism passed out copies of a statement about the action, which saluted the Handmaids for standing up against the US Supreme Court decision backing the phony abortion clinics, and for women's rights, and situated this in the larger fight to get rid of the whole fascist regime:
The Handmaids call on everyone to reject the normalization and accommodation of what was once considered unthinkable. They refuse to stand by in silence while the regime: puts children in cages; wages savage wars and makes gangster threats toward even greater and more devastating wars, even nuclear war; unleashes brutal white supremacy; demonizes Muslims; rips away rights of LGBTQ people; devastates the environment.
The Handmaids sound an alarm and a warning - of how far things have already gone, and how far they yet can go, if people do not rise up in their millions, in the name of humanity, to drive out this regime.
After visiting the clinic, the Handmaids returned to Union Square, where marchers shed their costumes for a public Speak Out. The plaza audience was invited to view three of seven Indictment Panels produced by RefuseFascism.org .
Participants in Monday's action plan to repeat their street performance, and proposed August 26 Unite for Justice: Bay Area to #StopKavanaugh for a venue. In conclusion, Handmaids "mic checked" the Refuse Fascism 2018 Call to Action:
"We Pledge that we will not stand aside while there is still a chance to stop a regime that imperils humanity and the earth itself. Join us. Let's stand together with conviction and courage, overcoming fear and uncertainty, to struggle with all we've got to demand:THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO!"
He's hardly the only one rejecting 'civil' discussion of Trump's legitimacy. "We've known he's a racist since at least 1989, when he tried to get the Central Park Five killed -- executed for a crime they did not commit," Smith says. "And maybe before that, when he wouldn't rent any of his properties to black people."
On the eve of the 'Unite the Right' rally in Washington, DC, the Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching author slamed the president on national TV over his National Football League tweets against black players. "In seeing the NFL players be insubordinate and not deferential to a white supremacist notion of what country and fealty to country should be, he is calling for them to bend a knee to him, to say to them that they need to recognize their place, to not step out of line, to entertain us, to be the black bodies that entertain us," Smith continued.
The second Unite the Right rally will start in Lafayette Park in Washington, DC, from August 11 to 12, the anniversary of the original in Charlottesville, Virginia; according to the rally's website, the main demonstration is planned to start at 5:30 pm in Lafayette Square on the 12th. Jason Kessler, the main face of the rally, initially wanted to hold the second demonstration in Charlottesville, but the city denied his request, which led him to the nation's capital. -- Amanda Arnold, The Cut
National Park Service documents show confirmed speakers include neo-Nazi Patrick Little, former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, Suidlanders spokesman Simon Roche, Patriot Prayer follower Kevin Cormier, Revolutionary Conservative editor Avialae Horton, attorney Corey Mahler, and "pro-white" town manager Tom Kawczynski.
Why is this allowed to happen?
RefuseFascism.org counter-protesters have put out a call:
In the Name of Humanity, Join Refuse Fascism in DC to Say NO to White Supremacy and a Fascist America!
Our actions to stop these fascist white supremacists should build the unity and strength needed to launch a nationwide struggle beginning with tens of thousands in cities across the country that continue day after day and DO NOT STOP until the demand, This Nightmare Must End: The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!, is met. All who want to fight for a better future need to forge the unity to stop this fascism before it is too late.
Donate to send Refuse Fascism to DC here
This Nightmare Must End: The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!
RefuseFascism.org is gearing up for action against concentrated attacks on female autonomy by Christian fundamentalist allies in government. Handmaid's Tale volunteers will gather and march to sound an alarm and a warning - of how far things have already gone, and how far they yet can go, if people do not rise up in their millions to stop this regime.
The June 26th Supreme Court decision, NIFLA vs. Becerra, upheld the pro-life challenge to reproductive freedom enjoyed by Californians. As atrocious as that ruling is, it is just a taste of what is coming. And it has national consequences: abortion continues to be increasingly more difficult to access, more dangerous to provide, and more stigmatized than ever. Women are being forced to go to desperate measures to secure abortions--often traveling hundreds of miles, going deep into debt, enduring sexual degradation to come up with the funds, losing their jobs, and more.
So-called "crisis pregnancy centers" coerce women and girls to bear children against their will. At this protest, we will be acting in the spirit of refusing to accept a world in which women are valued as incubators and little more, in an extreme patriarchal society; and we will be refusing to accept a fascist America. We will be contributing to the battle to drive the Trump/Pence regime from office.
Key events for the Handmaids protest:
Thursday August 9, 6:30pm: Fundraiser and party to raise funds for Handmaids costumes, La Corneta Tacqueria, 2751 Mission Street, San Francisco
Friday August 10, 7:00pm: Sewing/Costume making/Pizza nite, Revolution Books, 2444 Durant, Berkeley
Monday August 13, 1:00pm: Gather at Powell and Market (cable car turnaround) in San Francisco for the Handmaids march through Union Square and to a "crisis pregnancy center."
The Handsmaids are only fictional characters in a Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale." Trump, Pence, Kavanaugh and many more now in power are all too real. The Handmaids issue a call: a fully fascist America is barreling down the pike - unless we rise up and drive the regime from power.
Join in providing financial support for Refuse Fascism by pledging to contribute a monthly sustainer: http://donate.refusefascism.org/
"I don't want to sugarcoat it: it's not going to be easy, and there are no guarantees of success," writes USC School of Cinematic Arts research professor Perry Hoberman. "But it is possible. Millions of people--almost certainly the majority of Americans--hate this and are agonizing over what this regime is doing to our country, the world and the planet itself...
"The regime's words and actions, insane as they might appear to any rational human being, are not arbitrary, and they're not just bluster. These guys mean exactly what they say.
"[Fascists] will continue until we force them to stop," concludes Hoberman. "And that's not going to happen through normal channels."
Next World Can't Wait-endorsed Refuse Fascism organizing meeting Tuesday July 24, 6:30pm
Join us at the Sports Basement, 1590 Bryant and 15th Street, San Francisco
"You don't need permission to do what's right," says organizer Coco Das.
"You don't need permission from elected officials ...
"You don't need permission from the media ...
"You don't need permission from pundits ...
"You don't need permission from lawyers ... your favorite non-profit ... from Canada or Switzerland or the United Nations ... You know what this regime is doing is criminal, so act without permission. Follow your conscience."
Join the movement to drive out the Trump/Pence Regime!
Meetup 12 Noon
San Francisco Federal Building
7th Street & Mission
Volunteers needed to premiere huge, door-sized panels depicting RefuseFascism.org INDICTMENTS of government policy:
- Crimes Against Muslims
- Stripping Away Civil Liberties and Criminalizing Dissent
- Crimes Against People of the World
- Waging War on Women and LGBTQ People
- White Supremacy, Police Brutality, and Mass Incarceration
- Waging War on Truth, Science, and the Environment
- Terrorizing and Attacking Immigrants and Refugees
As hundreds of thousands are taking to the streets in outrage at the obscene ripping away of children from their families by the Trump/Pence Regime... as fascist court rulings enshrine Christian fascist oppression as law of the land, as the SCOTUS backs disenfranchising black and brown voters and upholds a Muslim Travel Ban...getting these substantive, big and bold indictments out across the country is a potential game-changer.
These posters are traffic-stoppers, literally and figuratively. They confront people with the REALITY, the BIG PICTURE of a FASCIST REGIME imperiling humanity and the earth itself. People all over the world are counting on us to STOP this nightmare.
For more than two years, Democrats have struggled to box resistance to Trump et al in a "civilized" package of reform for the corrupt and untenable system of global exploitation they propagate. Today's Supreme Court rulings should make us cast aside all illusions that there is a way out of this nightmare through "checks and balances" built into the three branches of U.S. government. Congressional failure to restrain overreach of executive privilege requires a movement by the millions of people who deeply hate what is going on to drive out the Trump/Pence regime.
We must not underestimate the determination of fascists to effect a thoroughly reactionary restructuring of society. "We are horrified and angered at the shocking damage already done to lives here and around the world by the Trump/Pence regime," reads the preamble to Refuse Fascism's 2018 Call to Action. "We recognize that they are poised to do far worse... Therefore, WE RESOLVE that nothing short of removing this whole illegitimate regime from power will stop this nightmare."
Recent attempts at shaming institutional Democrats are lambasted by establishment-aligned party officials -- and hailed by a new guard of disobedience (direct action) leaders united in creating the kind of political situation where the Trump/Pence regime is driven out. We must shake millions awake, to confront the reality that the world as we have known it is being torn asunder. RefuseFascism.org has a way.
World Can't Wait members and friends are invited June 26 and following Tuesdays to weekly planning meetings, 6:30pm on the third floor of Sports Basement, 1590 Bryant (at 15th Street), San Francisco.
"I'll never forgive Trump and I won't stop talking about it," says Mike Mills, founding member of the alternative rock band R.E.M. "It's not just who he is and what he represents... It's what he's done to the American political process. He has allowed stupidity to be the coin of the realm, he has allowed thinking that has been and should always be marginalised and on the edges to become almost part of the mainstream...
As opinion columnists like Thomas Friedman capitulate to the Democratic Party for relief from "trumpence" in a wistful fit of magical thinking, people of conscience confront the failed policy of "lesser evil" politics that strangle any meaningful resistance to the outrageous crimes of their government.
Congressional endorsement of state-sponsored terror, most recently demonstrated by approval of a torture advocate to head the Central Intelligence Agency, confirms what we already knew: the tripartite system of U.S. governance is not going to be reformed from within. Gina Haspel's commitment to defending the unlawful actions of her colleagues guarantees a repeat of the U.S. prisoner abuse exported to Guantanamo and beyond.
CIA veterans lobbied for the nominee, calling Haspel a competent, experienced and highly qualified intelligence professional. "That's why she's a terrible choice," said John Feffer at the Institute for Policy Studies. But unscrupulous, unquestioning obedience to criminal directives is a highly regarded quality in the fascist circle attending the White House. President Trump chose the C.I.A. director precisely because of her past, celebrating Haspel's role in the "enhanced interrogation" program that included the controlled drowning of detainees.
Haspel's confirmation by the U.S. Senate in no way absolves CIA complicity in America's wars of terror. Nor does it relieve congressional oversight responsibility to hold public officials accountable for criminal actions. But it should compel the rest of us to take up the call to stop the crimes of our increasingly fascistic government, before it is too late.
This week, Franklin Graham, son of the late Billy Graham, brings his "Decision America" tour to Berkeley to take a stand against California's "blue wall." Billed as religious "revivals", Graham's campaign-style rallies across California and the Pacific Northwest advance opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.
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Graham's sponsorship of Donald Trump's program of white supremacy, misogyny and xenophobia is billed as a religious revival, but make no mistake: "Decision America" is about mobilizing a blind, obedient, and fervent fascist base for the Trump/Pence regime.
Trump's call to "Make America Great Again" gets misrepresented as regression to an earlier, less compassionate America, warns The American Prospect columnist Adele Stan. But what we're facing is much more than a pendulum swing of American values. "Taken together... these assaults... add up to groundwork laid for the imposition of a much harder form of authoritarianism likely planned for the near future. You just have to step back far enough from the onslaught of outrageous actions to view the pattern."
White evangelical support was essential to the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and continues to facilitate expansion of the organized repression and terror characteristic of his rule. By no means monolithic (endorsement of the president occasions much discord among religious groups), Trump's "Make America Great Again" program represents a particularly American version of fascism, substantiated in modern day application of Manifest Destiny and End Times theology.
"It would be a mistake to be dismissive of End Times believers," says humanist David Niose, "because their influence in American policymaking is far from marginal." "End times," or "end of days" eschatology is embraced by numerous employees of the Trump/Pence regime, including secretary of state Mike Pompeo. Donald Trump's evangelical Christian Cabinet threatens to "bring an unsettlingly theocratic attitude to America's foreign policy," warns Vox staff writer Tara Isabella Burton.
"For many evangelicals, apocalyptic 'good versus evil' battles, particularly centered over the 'Holy Land' of the Middle East, are signs that the longed-for end may be at hand," adds Burton. The widespread fixation among evangelicals with the end times helps to explain their outspoken defense of a president who holds little regard for the future of humanity -- or the planet.
Freelance art critic Christian Frock demands exposure of Israeli Apartheid:
"American media needs to be held accountable for reporting on what happened in Gaza and on what is happening to Palestinians every day.
"Americans also need to understand our complicity in this violence and to do our part, as consumers, to lift up journalism that tells the truth about rising fascism worldwide and to crowd-correct journalism that avoids ugly truths...
"Arts coverage is not life or death, but it can hold a mirror up to much larger systemic abuses."
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Climate scientist Ben Santer fights 'alternative facts'. He's not alone. The consequences of global warming denial affect every person on the planet. Santer advises human actions must be part of the solution:
"You jump through hoops. You do due diligence. You go down every blind alley, every rabbit hole. Over time, the evidence for a discernible human influence on global climate becomes overwhelming.
"You tell others what you've done, what you've learned and what the climatic 'shape of things to come' might look like if we do nothing to reduce emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. You speak not only to your scientific peers but also to a wide variety of audiences, some of which are skeptical about you and everything you do. You enter the public arena and make yourself accountable."
Donald Trump is more hostile to modern science than any previous president, adds history of science professor Robert N. Proctor. "We now live in a world where ignorance of a very dangerous sort is being deliberately manufactured, to protect certain kinds of unfettered corporate enterprise."
We can't afford to wait years for a change in management. We must create a political situation where the Trump administration's program is repudiated, where Trump and Pence are driven from office.
"The Trump administration has promised vast changes to U.S. science and environmental policy," headlines the National Geographic. "The stakes are enormous." Writers Michael Greshko, Laura Parker, and Brian Clark Howard are tracking them as they happen. Their list is pretty damn comprehensive, and well worth a read.
"For a society so worried about things that can kill us, we've focused very little of our attention on the thing that surely will," observes Tom Engelhardt, author of The United States of Fear. "Warming of the planet -- thanks to the fossil fuel system we live by and the greenhouse gases it deposits in the atmosphere -- is already doing real damage to our world.
"When we speak of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), we usually think of weapons -- nuclear, biological, or chemical -- that are delivered in a measurable moment in time. Consider climate change, then, a WMD on a particularly long fuse, already lit and there for any of us to see."
War and militarism fuel climate change. "The Pentagon is the single greatest institutional consumer of fossil fuels," notes Environmentalists Against War Gar Smith. "Oil barrels and gun barrels both pose a threat to our survival. The amount of oil burned -- and the burden of smoke released -- increases whenever the Pentagon goes to war."
But "the real danger is that the way we live our lives as Americans, no matter our optimism about the future, is no longer sustainable," warns Eddie Glaude Jr., chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton.
"We can't continue to live with the current level of income inequality. Hard working people are working longer hours for less pay. And politicians and their benefactors continue to argue for trade policies that have decimated the working class in this country. We can't continue to lock up black and brown people or watch them killed in cold blood by people sworn to protect us or fail to publicly educate all of our children. We can't continue to bomb people around the world into oblivion."
We should not cower in fear, counsels Professor of Theology and Culture Mark Lewis Taylor. "Privileged citizens and residents need to bare their rage at the structures of abuse. . . we need to renew our commitments to the political movements on the ground and at work in contesting both the right and the 'lesser evil' of today's corporate and imperial state." But "any fresh vanguard for revolutionary change, must come from the most vulnerable themselves, from the communities long targeted by racist and misogynous power in the history of U.S. capitalism's structural violence. It is these communities' movements that put material pressure on the more privileged and protected to resist the corporate state.
"Those most vulnerable to a Trump regime are not powerless. They are not primarily -- surely not only -- victims. They are also resisters with powers for throwing off oppression, building movements for justice and to redress wrongs and imagine new political life. All the while they can also extend at times astonishing acts of love and human dignity."
We must not let ignorance win. People all over the world need for us to succeed. Read, share, add your name to the new Refuse Fascism Call to Action that diagnoses the existential threat to humanity posed by Donald Trump's war on science and the only way to stop it: The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!
