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We Have 147 Days to Prevent Another Capitol Insurrection
Before January 6, 2025, we need Americans across the country to demand that their lawmakers have the courage to certify the 2024 election results and reject the extreme Project 2025 agenda.
Aug 12, 2024
On January 6, 2021, we risked our lives to protect the American people’s duly-elected representatives from a violent mob that sought to overturn the results of a free and fair election. In doing so, we fought to defend American democracy itself. We could have never predicted the violence we would face that cold, January morning, but it was the mission we faced, and we rose to the occasion. We wish that we could say the same about the election deniers in Congress.
Despite the fact that thousands of MAGA rioters stormed the Capitol, assaulted over 140 police officers, and threatened the lives of congress members, 147 extreme MAGA Republicans still voted to overturn the 2020 election, including the Speaker of House Mike Johnson (R-La.). Today, we are 147 days away from January 6, 2025, when Congress will be tasked with certifying this year’s election results. Between now and then, we need Americans across the country to demand that their lawmakers have the courage to certify the 2024 election results and reject the extreme Project 2025 agenda so that the horrific tragedy of January 6, 2021 never happens again.
We have spent the last three years calling out those who voted to overturn the election because we know that another insurrection is possible. January 6 only happened because the former president and his lap dogs in Congress stoked insidious election lies among their followers. Elected officials like Speaker Johson were not merely responding to election deniers’ “concerns,” they were manufacturing them. By entertaining the Big Lie and developing fraudulent legal strategies to overturn the election, they gave permission to their supporters to attack American democracy. As a result, seven people, including several of our law enforcement colleagues, lost their lives.
On January 6, 2025, members of Congress will have to ask themselves: will they fulfill their duty to the American voters, protect the peaceful transfer of power, and disavow the Project 2025 agenda, or will they put their own political ambitions ahead of public service?
Two-thirds of Americans fear another January 6 because MAGA extremists haven’t changed their tune about the Big Lie. In fact, they’ve doubled down. Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s remarks at the National Association of Black Journalists convention, where he said he “absolutely” would pardon the convicted January 6 rioters, demonstrates this. Unfortunately, they aren’t stopping there. House Republicans are laying the groundwork for another insurrection and pushing their extreme Project 2025 agenda forward.
Project 2025 moves us from the physical violence we faced on January 6 into a bureaucratic assault on the rule of law. It is nothing short of a takeover of the federal government that would threaten our freedom to vote and undermine the ability of federal agencies to protect much-needed election infrastructure. Project 2025 would fundamentally alter our government and weaken guardrails around presidential power—all for the benefit of corporations, wealthy donors, and the far-right fringe—to the detriment of everyday Americans like us. MAGA Republicans’ support for this extreme agenda clearly shows that their mission remains the same as it did four years ago.
Even though these extremists’ anti-democratic actions are no longer surprising, it is still hard for us to fathom that Republicans in Congress are still committed to the Big Lie and Project 2025 even after running away in fear from a violent mob that was targeting them and their colleagues while wielding bear mace, zip ties, and firearms. Clearly, they prioritize power and party politics over duty and service—values that the 140 police officers showed when defending the Capitol. But we don’t need to understand it, we need to stop it from happening again. We are calling out MAGA extremists’ election lies because we want to ensure that no one has to risk their life to ensure a free and fair election.
Several congressional leaders have already committed to defending and certifying this year’s election results regardless of the outcome. For the next 147 days we are calling on Congress to courageously stand up for our democracy. On January 6, 2025, members of Congress will have to ask themselves: will they fulfill their duty to the American voters, protect the peaceful transfer of power, and disavow the Project 2025 agenda, or will they put their own political ambitions ahead of public service?
The 140 police officers who saved their lives that day will be watching to see how they answer.
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Be Prepared to Fight Trump's Mass Deportations
Are we poised to witness the greatest domestic act of genocide since the expulsion of Indigenous people?
Jul 27, 2024
I visited Annunciation House in November of 2019. This is a Catholic-run haven for homeless migrants, a drop of water to combat a limitless thirst. Most people, fleeing climate catastrophe and the political violence orchestrated by decades of U.S. efforts to destroy progressive regimes in Latin America, find no such respite. Nonetheless, people flee starvation, political instability, and death squads, even if the trek across the searing desert kills a great many of them. Families, children, pregnant women, the elderly—people with absolutely nothing—have been trapped between the proverbial rock and a hard place. During my 2019 visit to El Paso, Annunciation House was nearly empty due to then-U.S. President Donald Trump's "remain in Mexico" policy.
Refugees flee from deadly conditions no matter how slight their chances for asylum. These migrants are chess pieces for U.S. politicians. North of the Rio Grande, refugees seeking asylum encounter the myths and biases of political theater. Immigrants—suffering, dreaming, striving, and dying—have only symbolic worth to politicians. They are the commodities that can be driven with the sledge hammer of propaganda, deep into our reptilian brains.
Many Americans have always hated immigrants, and U.S. leaders have used that hatred to pump up frothing voters. We have drawn a peculiar line of delineation between those whose ancestors arrived long ago, and those who belatedly attempt to make the same transition. The collective sport of reviling the foreign born has grown in direct proportion to the ruin of forests and fields. As the climate slashes bloody fissures in the agricultural systems of the Global South, politicians in wealthy countries gather the spoils and trade cruelty for votes.
Do Trump's reprehensible promises inevitably become policy? Likely, yes. Trump has staked his legacy to his vow to punish undocumented residents mercilessly.
On the walls of Annunciation House residents display their works of art—a random jumble of shoes lie haphazardly within a glass display case. These shoes represent those who died in the desert. Thousands of people succumb to heat stroke, hypothermia, falls in rough terrain, and dehydration. Border patrol agents have famously spilled water from containers left by good Samaritans. The Chihuahuan Desert heat acts in tandem with the merciless border agents. One staff person at Annunciation House told me about a man and a small child on their knees in prayer. They gave thanks for having survived a 10 day ordeal in the desert, she told me.
One recalls that a much larger pile of shoes represent the gassed victims of Auschwitz. We associate shoes with mobility, opportunity, life—"pull yourself up by your bootstraps." When an assassin's bullet flicked off a piece of Trump's ear, he dropped and his shoes fell off to be photographed on the stage. Even the near death of a tyrant can be reduced to shoes.
Our media pundits seldom focus on refugees with discipline and depth. We rarely reflect on why people come to seek asylum—it is our government that has assisted in the installation of right-wing military juntas, and thus intervened in the political systems of Brazil, Nicaragua, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. The U.S. has instituted embargos upon Cuba and Venezuela in the effort to inflict suffering on citizens of these countries and spread instability. Our relentless burning of fossil fuels and our corporate plunder of Amazonian rain forest have caused climate collapse in the Global South.
We don't usually have an election that has been as perfectly choreographed as this one in 2024. Every brick, every bolt, wire, and ornament has been lovingly placed by predetermined forces. President Joe Biden's descent into slobbering senility, a bullet that precisely pinpricked Trump's ear (drawing just enough blood for dramatic effect and not a drop more), a cascading series of events in Israel and Gaza to frame the Democratic Party's suicidal connection to the genocidal IDF, the rise of the Supreme Court in its newly mutated enormity—everything has been handcrafted to give us fair warning. Every nuance of random chance has fallen exactly in the direction of Republican favor.
It may seem that Biden's withdrawal and the abrupt emergence of Kamala Harris from the crypt of vice-presidential anonymity now changes Republican good fortunes, but it does not. Harris is unlikely to significantly distance herself from the travesty of Gaza, or crawl out from Biden's shadow (though I anxiously hope that she surprises skeptical progressives and becomes an advocate for peace). Democrats continue on the treadmill of hasty choices. So long as the Democrats fail to produce a movement of working class passion in favor of pulling centrists out of the emergency supply closet, the groundswell of fascism will continue. This will not be an election like 2016, where people wake up in shock the next morning.
In 2016 comedian Jim Jefferies quipped that he might vote for Trump to see "just how crazy shit gets." We more or less know now, but not exactly. Trump has no policy, no platform, no values. He is absolutely not Hitler with an orange wig. Hitler was young and riveted upon the fine details of a society driven by the principles of eugenics. Trump is ancient, scattered, barely intelligent, and trivial to the core.
His bigotry is less deeply felt than transactional. Still, like a rat that understands which lever releases a pellet of food, Trump has figured out that cruelty toward immigrants inspires the love of his acolytes. His chaotic, stupid, disorganized blather gains coherence and meaning only by returning again and again to the fantasy that millions of snarling migrants have been marauding throughout the nation, murdering, raping, selling fentanyl, living in luxurious hotels, and sucking the life blood out of the American people.
Are we to watch passively as up to 20 million innocent souls are dragged from their homes to be interned, deported, or butchered? The only line of defense against genocide is the American public.
Without this preposterous, delusional tale, Trump could not get enough votes to become the animal control officer of the town of Bumfuck. Immigration, or rather, the racist fairy tale about dark-skinned, barbarian invaders raping and pillaging at the urging of the Biden administration—which allegedly aspires to bludgeon white political power with an unlimited roster of illegal voters—is pretty much the solitary plank in the MAGA platform.
There are a few so-called cultural issues that add flavor to the MAGA gruel—stuff like eliminating transgender access to bathrooms of choice and tossing books willy-nilly out of schools and public libraries. The Republicans also cling to their free market/neocon policies—welfare for billionaires, charity for fossil fuel megaliths, private prisons, increased funding for military and police—but these are honorable, bipartisan policies near and dear to the heart of America. No one gets excited about erasing Darren Woods' tax bill. The crown jewel, indeed the only jewel, in the MAGA world view is the imminent public display of vicious and violent military force enacted upon unarmed, dark-skinned civilians. Immigration narratives provides cover for an old-fashioned, Tulsa-styled race riot.
That is what energizes voters, and that is why Trump rambles distractedly about windmills and flushed toilets, but always returns to the horror story of a nation being ravaged by criminals and insane asylum escapees from the Global South. The true target of MAGA rage is not even immigrants or illegals, but rather, poor people. This passage from Ken Cuccinelli, writing for the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025—the reimagining of the Department of Homeland Security as The Waffen-SS—displays the MAGA passion for a eugenics informed policy of immigration:
The incoming administration should spearhead an immigration legislative agenda focused on creating a merit-based immigration system that rewards high-skilled aliens instead of the current system that favors extended family-based and luck-of-the-draw immigration. To that end, the diversity visa lottery should be repealed, chain migration should be ended while focusing on the nuclear family, and the existing employment visa program should be replaced with a system to award visas only to the "best and brightest."
Cuccinelli's vision involves military deployment on the southern border and Coast Guard intervention on the high seas. Cuccinelli's MAGA utopia features internment camps and strong-armed threats of sanctions against countries that balk at receiving the millions and millions of rounded up unfortunates. Police forces across the nation will be preoccupied with this anti-Latino pogram.
How will this be implemented? We all have the German WW II template in our brains—we picture door to door roundups, a bureaucratized system of collaborators and para-military forces, and a parallel deployment of Jewish police. But the U.S. is not WW II Germany or occupied Eastern Europe. Jews were well under 1% of the German population, whereas undocumented people comprise 3% of U.S. residents, and many of these have blood or marriage connections to people with U.S. citizenship. Those with Hispanic heritage comprise nearly a fifth of the U.S. population.
We have been warned well before the fact that the Trump administration, upon its inauguration in January of 2025, will launch a protracted genocidal action upon a large segment of our residents. This policy will be costly—potentially ruinous to our economy with lost labor and tax money in the trillions. But political theater defines life in the U.S. Trump is a mirage. We never quite understand the connection between his lies and his behavior. Do Trump's reprehensible promises inevitably become policy? Likely, yes. Trump has staked his legacy to his vow to punish undocumented residents mercilessly.
Depend on the Democratic Party to do jack shit. The Dems are already neck deep in MAGA immigration mimicry. What about the rest of us? Are we to watch passively as up to 20 million innocent souls are dragged from their homes to be interned, deported, or butchered? The only line of defense against genocide is the American public.
We should not be caught ruminating about our plan of action as the deed unfolds. We have about six months to prepare. And, please, no one should be believed in the future when they claim, "We had no idea."
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Violence Is Wrong, and So Is Trump
In the aftermath of the apparent attempted assassination, the mainstream media have exhorted us to embrace a form of collective amnesia, and to forget the dangers of Trumpism, MAGA, and Project 2025.
Jul 20, 2024
Following the attempt on former U.S. President Donald Trump’s life on July 13, it’s worth keeping in mind the old maxim that two things can be true at the same time.
One truth is that political violence has no place in a democracy. Even in a faltering and deeply flawed one such as ours, violence is wrong and must be condemned. At the same time, Donald Trump remains an existential threat to democracy. Trump, the MAGA movement, and the program for right-wing governance proposed by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 are all intertwined, and they have not changed. They remain as threatening as ever, and we must not shrink from saying so.
And yet, in the aftermath of the apparent attempted assassination, the mainstream media have exhorted us to embrace a form of collective amnesia, and to forget the dangers of Trumpism, MAGA, and Project 2025. We are told that what’s needed in this hour of peril is national unity, and to achieve unity we must accept a bogus narrative of moral equivalency that asserts that Democrats and Republicans, liberals, progressives, and conservatives, are equally guilty of using hyperbolic and divisive rhetoric for partisan gain.
Whether out of fear of reprisals from Trump should he be reelected or simply because of their fundamental corporate orientation, the mainstream media have attempted to steer the conversation away from the dangers of Project 2025 and MAGA extremism to a one-dimensional discussion of the need for unity. We cannot afford to go along.
Lester Holt’s July 15 interview with President Joe Biden is a prime example of this trend. The 20-minute session began with the NBC anchor pressing Biden to engage in “soul-searching” about a call he had with donors a week earlier, in which he reportedly said it was time to stop talking about his poor performance in the first debate and time to start putting Trump in a “bullseye.”
Holt brushed aside Biden’s weak attempt to defend the comment as a metaphor for focusing on Trump’s election denialism and history of using violent rhetoric to scapegoat immigrants and his political opponents. “This doesn’t sound like you’re turning down the heat,” Holt insisted, before segueing to the issues of Biden’s age and the persistent calls for him to drop out of the race.
Holt also dismissed Biden’s weak attempt to discuss Trump’s policy positions on abortion and climate change, and his selection of the crackpot JD Vance as his running mate. But most lamentable of all, neither Biden nor Holt brought up Trump’s longstanding ties to Project 2025, also known as the Presidential Transition Project, and the inchoate violence the project holds in store for all those who oppose it.
Although Trump has recently sought to distance himself from Project 2025, and has even gone so far as to claim he knows nothing about it, the former president is nothing if not a polished liar. In fact, Trump served as the keynote speaker at the Heritage Foundation event in April 2022 where the project was launched by the foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts.
“Our country is going to hell,” Trump declared in familiar fashion at the event, reprising the theme of American carnage that propelled him to presidency in 2016. From there, he went on to praise Heritage as a “great group… that will lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America and that’s coming. That’s coming.”
As Roberts explained in an appearance on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast on July 2, what’s coming with Project 2025 is nothing less than a “second American Revolution” that will be “bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
The details of the “revolution” are set forth in the Project’s 920-page manifesto called the “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.” Produced by Heritage with input, support, and advice from over 100 conservative groups, the mandate consists of 30 chapters written by leading figures on the American right, who demand sweeping overhauls of virtually every federal agency, from the Department of Defense to the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, and the Federal Reserve. Although drafted by different authors and directed at disparate agencies, each chapter promotes the common goal of centralizing all federal power in the hands of the president, advancing the so-called “unitary executive theory” long championed by the radical right.
The chapter on the Justice Department—written by Gene Hamilton, the vice president and general counsel of the America First Legal Foundation, a group founded by Trump adviser Stephen Miller—calls for the DOJ to be placed under direct presidential supervision. It also calls on the attorney general to pursue an aggressively “anti-woke” legal agenda, using “the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers who are engaged in discrimination” against white people under the guise of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs.
The chapter on the Office of Personnel Management, written by a trio of authors, including Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025 who served as and Trump’s OPM chief of staff, calls for reinstituting “Schedule F,” a job classification program implemented by Trump in October 2020 but subsequently repealed by President Biden. Under a renewed Schedule F, tens of thousands of federal workers would be stripped of civil service protections, and transformed into “at-will” employees who could be hired and fired solely on the basis of their loyalty to the president.
The chapter on the Department of Homeland Security, written by former Trump cabinet member Ken Cuccinelli, calls for the department to be dismantled and combined with other immigration agencies to create a more powerful force of border security and facilitate Trump’s goal of conducting the largest deportation program in American history.
And the parade of horrors does not end there. Other chapters advise the next Republican president to “stop the war on oil and natural gas” and replace carbon-reduction goals with initiatives to increase fossil-fuel production; “dismantle the administrative state;” eliminate the Department of Education and the National Weather Service (considered an agent of climate-change propaganda); and prohibit the mailing of the abortion pill mifepristone.
Whether out of fear of reprisals from Trump should he be reelected or simply because of their fundamental corporate orientation, the mainstream media have attempted to steer the conversation away from the dangers of Project 2025 and MAGA extremism to a one-dimensional discussion of the need for unity. We cannot afford to go along. As November approaches, remember the old maxim that two things can be true at the same time: Violence is wrong, and so is Trump and all that he stands for.
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