There are  few things that are as beautiful as furious women and girls and justice-loving people taking to the streets, standing up, standing shoulder-to-shoulder and fighting for a better future and a better world. And there could not be a more important time to be in the streets, to be standing up, to be giving voice to your righteous rage than right now. Because the Supreme Court, as we all know, is on track to overturn Roe v. Wade, to decimate women’s fundamental right to abortion. This would be an atrocity. This would be an atrocity. Forcing women to have children against their will is barbaric. It shatters lives. It forecloses dreams. It traps women in abuse. It forces women and girls to drop out of school, to lose their jobs, to lose their future. And it tells women, it tells all women and all girls, whether or not they ever become pregnant, that the state, a patriarchal state views them as less than fully human. Forced motherhood is female enslavement.

And if we let them overturn Roe v. Wade, this will not only be a nightmare for women and girls across this country for generations to come, this will not only send shockwaves of nightmare around the world because of the role that the U.S. plays around the world, this will accelerate the Christian fascist juggernaut that is also coming for contraception, for LGBTQ rights, that is also coming for the rights and the lives of Black people and other people of color. This is why we say, and we must mean it, and we must back it up with our bodies in the streets and our voices refusing to fall silent: Overturn Roe? (Hell NO!) Overturn Roe? (Hell NO!)

We need to stay in these streets. We need to stay in these streets. And I want to let you know, RiseUp4AbortionRights.org has called for this Thursday, building on the last two Thursdays, beautiful outpourings of students and youth across this country, from Kentucky to Tennessee to Colorado to Arkansas to Texas to here in New York City, walking out of school. This Thursday, there needs to be walkouts on a magnitude larger, across this country, coming back here at Union Square at 1 o’clock. And everybody has to wear green—green bandanas, green clothing, chalk the sidewalks green, hang green banners over freeway overpasses, spread the green everywhere. This Thursday, May 19.

And then next Thursday, May 26, all of us, joining the youth—we need to shut this country down. At noon, you have to leave work, leave school, leave whatever you’re doing. Musicians, bring your instruments into the streets. Everyone come out into the streets. People drive real slow or park on the overpasses and shut down the bridges and the tunnels. We need to bring this country to a halt.

And Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, we have been sounding the alarm since the Supreme Court first heard the case last December, that is now coming to a decision. We have been sounding the alarm. We have been rallying people. We have been calling on people to fill the streets to stop this from going down. And now that there has been a leak, millions have been jolted awake. Millions can see what’s happening.

And so it is so beautiful, it is so important, that millions are waking up and thousands and tens of thousands are in the streets today, not just at the 40 something rallies that Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights has held but at rallies across this country by Planned Parenthood and MoveOn and other organizations. We need this.

But we also need real talk, sisters and brothers, and beautiful people, we need real talk. Because just as this shockwave of alarm is spreading, just as people are coming out into the streets, there is also a louder and louder drumbeat being pushed by Democratic Party politicians and by so-called “leaders” who are tied to them, that the most realistic thing we can do is channel our energies off the streets and into the elections in the fall. This is something that the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian, who I follow, has warned about in an important new article at revcom.us. And he makes the point, and I’m going to make the point, that our power is out here in the streets. Not only is waiting till November too late, the Supreme Court will already have ruled by then. It’s too late. We need to stop them NOW! But the truth is, that voting is not the way any fundamental right has ever been won. It’s not the way any progress has been made. Think about it. Even the right to vote was not won by voting. It was won by sitting in, by walking out, by marching, by freedom riding, by going to jail, by going on hunger strikes, by walking across that Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, knowing that there were brutal, white-supremacist law enforcement and good ol’ boy Klansmen on the other side waiting to inflict barbaric violence. It took standing up. As the incredible abolitionist and freedom fighter and former slave Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” It never has, and it never will.

And on an even more deeper level, sisters and brothers, beautiful people, these Democrats, they pose as champions of women and the oppressed, but the truth is they have facilitated this assault on women’s fundamental right to abortion over decades. Over decades they have sought “common ground” with these religious theocrats. There can be no common ground with those who would enslave women. They have run anti-abortion candidates. And they have ceded the high moral ground to these theocrats and Christian fascists. What else does it mean to say, as Hillary Clinton and so many others did for years, that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare”? As if there is something wrong with it. There is nothing wrong with abortion. There is nothing wrong with women controlling their bodies, their lives, their destinies. That is a great thing. That is a beautiful thing. We need abortion on demand and without apology.

And here’s another thing that these Democrats don’t want to say and that so much of the movement doesn’t want to say: The assault on abortion has always been about controlling women. It has always been about controlling women. It’s not about health care in the abstract. Of course abortion is health care, but clinics aren’t bombed because it’s health care, they’re bombed because abortion gives women control over their lives and their destinies. It’s not about bodily autonomy—they like to say that—in the abstract. These fascists have no problem saying “my body, my choice” when they want to deny vaccines or masks. They don’t have a problem with bodily autonomy in the abstract, they have a problem with women. And as important as it is, as essential as it is, to stand up against the barbaric, the cruel, and the bigoted, and the murderous assaults on LGBTQ people, and in particular trans youth, we have to recognize that the assault on abortion is at its core an assault on women. And we have to tell the truth and we have to name women. And the Christian fascists certainly do. I remember when I first got involved in this fight, going up to defend the only, the last abortion clinic in North Dakota in the ’90s, and the religious fanatics who were laying siege to that clinic, they dropped to their knees and in their prayer they said was this—I’ll never forget it: “Lord, please break this curse of independence that has afflicted women.” They go after abortion, and they’re coming after birth control because it has given women a modicum of control over their lives and their destinies. And we have to call forward the fury of women, the outright, unbridled anger and rage of women at thousands and thousands of years of patriarchal chains, thousands of years of brutality, of women treated like punching bags and baby-making machines and sex objects and property of men. We have to unleash the pent-up, the long-suppressed fury that burns in the hearts of women and girls. We need to bring it into these streets to fight, right now, alongside everybody who cares about justice and a better future.

And I want to say to everybody who wants to understand more deeply why this assault is still going on, 50 years after this right was won, why are these Christian fascists, Dark Ages theocrats packed onto the Supreme Court and have so much power across this land? Why do the Democrats keep capitulating? And what does this have to do with the nature of the system we live under, and all the white supremacy and police terror, and all the terror against immigrants, and all the destruction of the planet, and all the crimes this country commits around the world—if you want to understand that more deeply, I invite you to watch the RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show that I co-host at YouTube.com/therevcoms. Come and learn about it.

But I want to close by emphasizing this: that right now, as we all know what’s coming but it is not yet law, we have a chance to do what women and girls and society as a whole needs from us. We need to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, whether you’re going to end up voting for the Democrats in November, or you’re like me and you’re trying to make a revolution to get rid of the whole system that they and the fascist Republicans represent—wherever you are coming from, in this we need to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, we need to stay in these streets, we need to raise our voices. We need to bring this country to a halt.

So I want to call on everybody. Thursday, May 19, back here, student walkouts. Thursday, May 26, nationwide shutdown. Everybody, go to the website RiseUp4AbortionRights.org. Sign up, volunteer. Don’t just turn out, but become an organizer. We need people reaching out to professional athletes, to musicians and celebrities and influencers, to students and religious networks. We need everybody to be bringing everybody they can into this right now. So I want you to put your fist in the air, and I’m going to close out: when I say “Overturn Roe” you say “Hell NO!” And when I say “No retreat” you say “Stay in the streets.”