No Kings: Stand Against Authoritarianism
Littleton, MA - Today, millions of Americans are standing up for their values, at over 2,000 No Kings rallies across the country. I am extremely proud at how some of the Littleton’s community leaders, including now David Hayward, founder of Indivisible Littleton, and Jeanine Wood, Chairwoman of the Littleton Democratic Town Committee, have transformed the Littleton Common this year into a place for people from across the Nashoba Valley to meet, resist, commiserate, and send a message that we stand for a robust democracy, against an increasingly Authoritarian President.
We are here to say that, yes, America is a nation of laws, and that no one is above the law. But I think we stand for far more than that. Collectively our task is to stand up for, dream, and fight for the kind of vision that the clear majority of Americans want - but are deeply confused about in an age of growing inequality, partisan divide, and isolation.
I was so proud to be here with so many of you just 4 months ago, at the first No Kings Rally. And then back in January, at the Women’s March, just days before Donald Trump was sworn-in for his second term. And I want to thank you for continuing to show up, pushing back on what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described in a 1967 speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, Georgia as The Three Evils of Society - Racism, Materialism, and Militarism. That day in Atlanta, King said “Like the prophets of old, we have read the handwriting on the wall. We have seen our nation weighed in the balance of history and found wanting. We have come because we see this as a dark hour in the affairs of men.”
Since June, we have born witness to these three evils being increasingly propagated by the Trump-Vance administration. Federal funding for any program or research invoking diversity has been gutted. With a quadrupling of the ICE budget in the Big Ugly Bill, mass deportation of immigrants, almost entirely people of color, has ramped up and terrorized communities, backed up by a shocking Supreme Court ruling that the federal government can racially profile people in America.
And the National Guard has been used to target almost entirely Democratic cities, creating a pseudo-police state that may be soon coming to Massachusetts.
While the U.S. military is seen on the streets of America for the first time in over two generations, President Trump has shown an increasing willingness to use weapons to attack other nations. Secretary Hegseth assembles the nation’s top military commanders to not so subtly tell them to get in line, while the President intimidates the Department of Justice to use a more subtle form of state violence, government prosecution, to go after his enemies.
Meanwhile, we are witnessing the most corrupt President in American history. Lawsuits filed against major media corporations that have dared to tell the truth about Donald Trump being settled for tens of millions of dollars for the Trump family. Virtually every visit to a foreign country involves real estate deals that benefit Trump. Bailouts of foreign governments by Trump Cabinet Secretaries that appear to financially benefit the close friends of Donald Trump. And the billions of dollars in government contracts being steered to the most favored companies of the Trump oligarchy, to help implement more detentions, more surveillance, more stripping away of the constitutional rights of Americans.
Throughout our nation’s proud but yes flawed history, everyday Americans - from civic, business and religious leaders and municipal officials in each of our communities, to civil rights heroes, union organizers, visionaries on LGBTQ rights, reproductive healthcare, and racial justice, advocates and activists advancing immigration laws, combating global warming, reforming our criminal justice system, and ending poverty - have given their blood sweat and tears, sacrificed so much, to create a far more just nation than existed in 1776. We have faced assaults on our democracy and freedom in the past - some from other nations, but at times our own government. And we, the people, have always overcome.
Looking out on this crowd, seeing so many people who have been part of the fights to expand the arc of justice, to create more economic security for all Americans, I feel confident that we can overcome this newest challenge, so that democracy and freedom shall be preserved. We will not allow this legacy to be destroyed by Trump or his right-wing disciples. We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, will not stand down.
We cannot, however, win these battles, or win the hearts and minds of many Americans deeply concerned about their futures, and what their children’s lives will be like, without a positive vision for what our nation should aspire to - and how our local, state and federal government will help deliver that vision. So I have three main questions I ask you to consider:
What do you want to see our country stand for and become, and what do you envision the lives of people in America to be?
Have you spoken to your friends, family members and neighbors who have different views from you, to reach some common ground?
And how do you want government to help achieve progress in society, and what do you want your government to do?
From the bottom of my heart, I want to thank you for showing up. Whether at this rally, at community meetings, on Beacon Hill, and on social media. As dark as many moments today are in America, there are also many points of light.
But I do think we need bolder goals for our country, recognizing that there are many Americans who have struggled, and seen their kids, neighbors and communities move backwards over the past 50 years. And that it is precisely that lack of hope and sense of frustration that have created a window of opportunity for a dangerously anti-democratic demagogue to lay such waste to our country, in such a short amount of time.
As Robert F. Kennedy said in 1966 to the students and anti-Aparthed leaders at South Africa's University of Cape Town,
“It is from the numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
At No Kings rallies across the country today, you are that resistance. It’s an honor to stand with you in solidarity in this powerful movement.
