Carl Dix: No Trump! No Pence! No Fascist America!
We Gotta Go to DC, We Gotta Stay in the Streets

January 2, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Editor’s note: The following is a slightly edited version of the speech Carl Dix gave to protesters in the streets of New York City on New Year’s Eve.

We are in the right place tonight. And we are here to say “NO!” No Trump! No Pence! No Fascist 2017! We say that because we know what Trump and Pence will mean for humanity. So we say NO! No Muslim registry. No immigrant bashing. No wall. No “pussy grabbing.” No taking away women’s right to abortion. No law-and-order president. No climate change denying. No suppressing civil liberties. No to every fucking thing Trump represents.

And look, this has got to be more than just us declaring that we don’t like Donald Trump. We don’t, but it’s got to be more than declaring that we don’t. We have to act on that declaration. We have to act in a determined way to reach out to and organize others into organizing others into organizing others to bring out people in their millions and millions to take to the streets in massive numbers and in a determined way, refusing to accept this fascist regime. That’s what we gotta do. And see, this is up to us. It ain’t no waiting and seeing what’ll happen. It ain’t hoping that the check and balances of the system will stop Trump. It is up to us, to take it into our hands and write history by stopping this fascist regime.

And look, I know that we weren’t planning to be three weeks away from a fascist regime taking the reins of power in society. This ain’t where we expected to be. But this is where we are. This is the challenge that is before us. People in the future will look back on this period, and what will they say? Will they say that we recognized the horror of the fascist Trump-Pence regime and threw our all, did everything we could to act to stop it now? Or will they say we failed to do that? That is not yet written. That will be determined by what we do, starting now.

And we have to go out, starting now, to build the kind of resistance that can force a political crisis and stop this regime. This is something that can be done. Millions and millions of people have already shown that they hate the things Trump campaigned on. That they hate what he stands for. That they are fearful, anguished, and outraged by everything he represents. We have to put before those millions that there is a way to act to stop it now. And we have to organize them into that way, taking up all the questions that they have, struggling with them to join in with us and be part of organizing others to join us. This is what we have to do.

Now we have a vision for that. That vision is up on the refusefascism.org website. And a key part of that is a paragraph that starts off with: Imagine, people in their tens of millions, taking to the street, acting in a determined way, refusing to accept this regime. This could force a situation where all factions in the authorities are faced with an ungovernable society and they have to determine how to deal with it. This could create the conditions that stop the Trump-Pence regime. This is not an idle dream. It is reality. And reality that can be realized, a vision that can be realized, if we act in a determined way.

And we got a plan for doing that. It basically comes down to taking our message, “No Trump!, No Pence!, No Fascist 2017!” to every corner of society to people and organizing them, struggling with them from the get-go to themselves become organizers, and organizers of organizers. We need to do that having it resonating from one side of the country to the other. A big opening shot in it is gonna be the publication of the call of Refuse Fascism as an ad in the New York Times with a broad and diverse array of signatories, including some well-known voices of conscience. This is gonna be an announcement to everybody that there is a broad and diverse array of people who are determined to act to stop it. A whole lot of people are going to be delighted to see it and inspired and want to get with this, and we have to organize them into it. Now a whole lot of other people ain’t gonna like it. They’re gonna hate it. They’re gonna attack it. But we are not gonna back down in the face of their attacks. In fact we’re gonna use their attacks jujitsu-style to build even greater momentum to bring people into the streets to stop this regime.

And part of getting this out, all over, we need to do a major blast in social media around this as well.

And this NO! does have to resonate in every arena of society. Starting tonight, you gotta take these NOs! that you got, in fliers and palm cards and in other ways on the subway, hand them out on your way back. Posting them in your neighborhoods. And that has to be building up to being in DC before Trump becomes president, and stopping that!

Educators have to go back to school and disrupt what usually goes on and say, we gotta have a teach-in, we gotta have a bunch of teach-ins, to get into: What is fascism? What’s the horror it causes? And how can we act to stop it? That too has to be building up to being in DC before Trump becomes president, and stopping that!

Students have to walk out of school. If you’re in college, if you’re in high school, if you’re in middle school, walk out to show your determination to not accept a future of being ruled by a fascist regime. And when you walk out of your school, if there’s another school across town that ain’t walked out yet, go over there and organize them to get with it and walk out and join this. Students need to be organizing to be in DC to change the course of history!

If you work in a laboratory or somewhere else where they do scientific research, you’ve got to publicly declare that you will not allow your expertise to be utilized to implement a fascist agenda, the agenda of Trump-Pence. You’ve got to do this in public, and you’ve got to throw into this movement.

If you are in a museum, a theater, or other cultural institution, you’ve got to go dark for several hours or even for a day to dramatize your refusal to accept this regime.

Every arena of society, we’ve got to be disrupting business as usual. We’ve got to draw from the experience of ACT-UP when it said, we are facing an AIDS epidemic and everybody in society has got to face that reality. They took it before everybody in society. We’ve got to do that with this message of NO! to Trump and Pence. And all that has to be building up to being in DC before Trump becomes president, and stopping that!

We’ve got to learn from the way that young people especially flowed into the streets after the system refused to indict the pigs that murdered Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in Staten Island. They took to the streets. They blocked traffic. They blocked highways. They stayed in the streets. We gotta learn from that.

And we gotta learn from Occupy Wall Street and the way they went to Zuccotti Park and stayed in Zuccotti Park, bringing the message of the inequality in this society before everybody. We’ve got to do the same.

And, again, this has to culminate in people coming to DC before the MLK holiday weekend, and not coming there for a protest one day and then go home. We gotta stay in the streets of DC, disrupting business as usual down there and calling for others to come, in the thousands and tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands and even millions. And people all across the country gotta be doing the same thing, disrupting the business as usual, saying whatever usually goes down in this society is not going to be allowed to go down, because we are refusing to accept the imposition of a fascist regime.

OK, and I gotta tell you, I’m going down to DC early. I might be down there next week. Some of y’all got to volunteer to come down with me so we can do advance work and organizing to get things ready for what we need to do. But if you ain’t coming down there, you’ve got to start right now. Get your friends together. Get your group together. Make your plans for spreading the message of NO!, starting right now, starting tomorrow, make your plans for that. Make your plans for getting down to DC and bringing others with you. Of if you can’t make it to DC, make your plans for how you’re gonna raise hell wherever you are. Because we have to act, in the millions and tens of millions, in a determined way, to stop this fascist regime before it can get started.

Remember, in the future they will look back at this period when a fascist regime was looming before humanity. What will they say? What will they say we did? We have to make sure they’ll be able to say, these people recognized this horror for what it is, and they threw everything they could into acting to stop it... and they stopped it. Thank you, sisters and brothers.

 

 

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