First I want to give my love to all you beautiful people who are out here today. As I said before… I know it’s a scary time. I know it’s a time when a lot of people are experiencing deep grief and heartache. And I’m going to talk about this. It’s a scary time for the future. It’s a scary time for tomorrow. But it’s important that you are feeling yourselves out here, because you are doing the most righteous and beautiful and uplifting and hopeful thing, which is being out here in public standing up. So… I want to give you some love and I want you guys to give yourselves some love. Go for it—make some noise out here! [big cheers from crowd]

…I am a co-initiator of Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights. And I have a major message to everybody here today and everybody who’s going to hear this speech later. The Supreme Court threat to women’s fundamental right to abortion is a major assault on the half of humanity that is born female and on society and justice as a whole. This must be defeated! That draft decision must not be allowed to become the law.

And this can be defeated. I am here today to say not only do we need to fight to stop this, we can win this. We need to stop it, because when women are denied the right to abortion, women are forced to have children against their will, and this is a form of violence. This is a form of subjugation, male-supremacist domination of women. It shatters lives. It forecloses dreams. It forces women and girls to drop out of school… to lose their jobs… to be trapped in abusive relationships. It drags women into poverty. And it causes many women to lose their very lives. We have to stop this from becoming the law in this country.

And when I say it can be stopped, a lot of people, they don’t believe me. They think I’m naïve. They think I don’t understand, or you don’t understand, how powerful the fascists on the Supreme Court are… that maybe we don’t realize that there’s a fascist women-hating movement in this country that has been built up over decades to terrorize and bomb abortion clinics, to kill doctors, to take over state legislatures, to pass things like that fascist law this morning in Oklahoma that bans all abortions. Well I know they’re powerful. I take them very seriously, which is why I am determined to insist, and you need to be determined to insist, that we stop them from getting any more power.

And we know that they’re powerful, but as much as they wish they were, they are not all-powerful. And they are not gods. We have power too. And our power is in the fact that we are right. We have justice on our side. We have the interests of women and humanity as a whole on our side. We have right on our side. And if we dare, if we lift our sights, if we don’t lose our nerve, if we go out and struggle with others… we can wake up a force that is a match for them.

I want you to imagine, if all the tens of thousands of people who marched in the streets in the last few weeks after the Supreme Court draft was leaked, marched with tears in their eyes and rage in their hearts—if they came back in these streets and they kept coming back. And if the thousands across this country who have marched with Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights saying “Overturn Roe?” [response from crowd: “HELL NO!”] “Overturn Roe?” [“HELL NO!”]—if we came back and we lifted people’s sights. I want you to imagine not just continuing the walkouts, but you young people using your moral authority and daring for the future to march to the hospitals at shift change, to challenge the nurses and doctors and healthcare workers to come out and join this fight, because they know it’s right. I want you to imagine marching to the theater districts and calling on the artists and actors and the audiences to come out into the streets and join us. I want you to imagine our beloved artists and actors using their influence, their stages, their platforms to call on more people to come into the streets. I want you to imagine if every one of the bus drivers and subway conductors and soccer moms transporting their kids to the games, if they decided they were going to bring it to a halt and stop the railways and stop the roads, even for an hour, to shake this society. I want you to imagine the pulpits and the mosques and the synagogues turning their faith into action in the streets. If we came out in our millions, in massive nonviolent, determined, relentless, sustained struggle—not one day and go back to normal, but again and again—calling on others. We can create a situation where those on the Supreme Court and the fascists everywhere else have to calculate, have to recognize that if they go forward, they will lose any shred of legitimacy in the eyes of the people of this country and around the world. We have that power if we are visible in these streets.

I want you to imagine the green… painting this whole city and this whole country green. Everyone wearing the bandana every day, tying it around trees, hanging it out your window, green flags on the cars, the lawns. I want you to imagine green draped over the statues of patriarchal, misogynist pigs, turning them green. I want us to do daring things. I want this country to be a city of green, unignorable, showing people how many of us there are, and encouraging the daring of so much more.

We have right on our side, and there are so many millions of lives in the balance. Now is not the time to lose our nerve. Now is not the time to give up without a fight. Now is the time to lift our sights and dare.

So I want to call on you, each of you, as you march today: Call on people to join us. But also, this Sunday, register now—this Sunday at 5 o’clock Eastern, we are having a national organizing Zoom. Every one of you needs to be in this. We need your ideas. We need your questions. We need your participation. We need your families to join. We need all of the people who are going to tell you they’re inspired by what you did but didn’t join you… you need to get them to register and join us. We need thousands of people tuning in to work together this Sunday, to carve out the next steps where we are going to dare.

Look, it’s the third quarter. The decision from the Supreme Court is coming soon. We are coming from behind. But all the greatest movies, all the greatest songs, all the greatest legends are about the underdogs who rose when everybody counted them out. So don’t let them count us out. Now is the time to rise. Don’t underestimate your power, and don’t underestimate what we can accomplish. Be part of this organizing summit on Sunday. Let’s take the future back. I want everybody—you have a role to play—everybody has a role to play.

So let me end with this. I want to acknowledge, as I began, that today is a day of great heartache, and to everybody who has walked out against the gun violence and the slaughter in Texas, and against the horrific white supremacist massacre in Buffalo, and all the other cruel and vicious violence—I share your heartache. I share your grief. I share your fear. But I do not share the despair that so many are feeling. I recognize the danger, but I also see the basis for hope.

And I want to invite you to be part of pulling open the big questions about why this keeps happening; what this has to do with the history of white supremacist terror in this country, this gun violence; what it has to do with the violence that the U.S. pervades around the world, with its war crimes and crimes around the world; what it has to do with the misogyny and the cruel masculine, patriarchal culture of brutality. There are answers, sisters and brothers and beautiful people, beyond what I can speak about today. But I want to invite you to be part of lifting your heads and asking those questions and seeking those answers.

And for my part, I want to invite you—I put out a Revolution, Nothing Less Show, I’m a co-host. It’s on YouTube. We dig into these questions—they’re deep, they’re profound, but there is a way through them and there is a way forward. It's at youtube.com/therevcoms. I invite you, I urge you, and most of all, I salute you for being out here. We are going to go forward, and we have to dare to fight to win. There’s a whole future on the line. Let’s not lose our nerve now. Thank you.