Remove: Not Just a Coalition—a Duty
Somewhere in Minneapolis a young girl is writing in her diary. Somewhere in that city by the harsh digital light of a computer screen rather than that of a candle, she is writing a tale of her sorrow. She has someone in her family who is undocumented or she is herself. She sees her friends laughing without her and she is forgotten. She’d like to play in the winter sand, but instead she watches her neighbor's dog enjoy more freedom than she has to make snow angels. Now on the news she hears that ICE is coming door to door to look for her. She writes because she feels alone and is afraid.
History isn’t recorded just in dusty tomes written by victors. It also exists in the stories of human beings stressed beyond imagination doing what they can to survive in a world that is often cruel; that rejects them for reasons that are beyond their control. Her words, yet unknown to the world, will touch and torch all of our souls some day, and become the true telling of the history we are now suffering through.
Today there are a million untold stories of human beings loosely wired into a network of activists, patriots, friends, and family. Each of them is a node of consequence who has risen to a calling. This calling comes from some place deep in each of our souls that is hard to define exactly. It’s a bit awkward to talk about because words we don’t often use like duty, conviction, and honor bubble to the surface. They sound out of place in the bland of everyday life and yet we feel like nothing more true has ever been uttered when we say it.
This calling is at times isolating and frightening, like we are being driven by an invisible hand to unknown ends. But march on we do, because march on we must! We are a movement on a mission—focused, disciplined, sometimes ruthless. We always have an eye towards some common good that we know can be achieved. We have a duty to our ancestors and our descendants to fight for that good. We have a duty to that little girl to fight hard.
This energy like lighting in a bottle has persisted for about a year, and its size, scale and competence grows with each and every day. With every passing hour we make a new friend, learn a new skill, develop more confidence, or create something new. Each of us is a soldier preparing for a battle, a priest seeking absolution, or an entrepreneur trying to do something they have never done before. We are each of us growing muscles with each exertion and gaining new capacity and fiber. We are faster, more nimble, more strategic, and more disciplined than we were one year ago.
Not only is a girl writing a diary somewhere in an attic in Minneapolis, so are writers, artists, and comedians telling this story and reminding us to look for her. So are clergy bearing witness to crimes and providing moral strength. So are old soldiers in the field wearing their colors and reminding the people of the necessity of resilience. Lawyers are absolute heroes in this movement. They are holding back institutional rot and giving us the time to figure out our teething problems.
So too are hundreds of thousands of mobilized citizens working in loose whisper networks sharing information, tactics, strategies, and other methods of resisting this totalitarian rule.
But this individualized capacity is meaningless if we cannot mass the entire machine we are building into a single entity that can defend the powerless and hold the powerful to account. We must do this ourselves, because our institutions, for all their potential greatness, are currently led predominately by men and women with a character that is insufficient to the moment's demands.
Our prosperity in certain sectors and segments of our society have led to an idleness, hubris, and intellectual laziness that has collectively sapped our power. Divisions long left unresolved between class, race, and other forms of identity have allowed the vile cancer of hatred to grow and fester. We’ve grown rigid ideologically and that makes it difficult to find solutions. We allowed technology to be inserted into our relationships and then monetized, and now it’s being weaponized by our adversaries and those with ill intent to undermine the fabric of our society. We must rebuild these things that we have lost, and it will not be an easy challenge.
But the citizenry of this movement could be forged into new institutions, each one a bastion of liberty that sings in a language all Americans understand—that our future is ours to decide and not the leaders that have mishandled its privileges and led us to this point.
This is why coalition building is so important. Building coalitions enables you to coordinate local actions at a national scale, and build a network for the movement of information, human resources, and political power. In activism much of our time is spent navigating the complexities inherent in the process of building coalitions. It is slow and human work that is required if we are to successfully navigate this new reality we find ourselves in. But it is how we all find our voice.
Recently, Mass 50501 has joined the Remove Coalition. Remove organizes direct lobbying efforts on Congress to create constituent pressure on elected leaders to vote to impeach, remove, and convict the Trump Regime from office. We will also be experimenting with efforts at direct lobbying - in our home state during the 1/20 America Walk Out event. 50501 National has also joined this coalition. We expect over time the number of partners to increase. It’s our promise—to this little girl—that we will try.
This Coalition is led by Jessica Denson, an activist and organizer who was a staffer involved in the first Trump campaign. She now fully admits to falling under the spell of the MAGA cult. She has the courage to admit how it eroded her character until epiphany struck and she was able to break free of its malign influence. This makes her a powerful messenger for the opposition because she offers an example of the possibility of redemption without the surrender of her identity as a patriotic American citizen.
The pressure of the campaign may not necessarily result in impeachment, and certainly not right away, but it can result in more aggressive and less docile actions by our elected leaders - who in this moment seem to be failing to make a sufficiently strong case for a robust defense of our Constitution and our values.
No more can we let the feckless, the mild, and the pathologically polite lead us. We require strength, courage, and the fierceness of a lion on the hunt—not half measures, triangulation, or habitual capitulation. The Trump Regime is now at war with the American people, and we must answer that with non-violent but aggressive and unapologetic resistance. This monster we created cannot be appeased. It can only be defeated.
We owe it to the courageous people of Minneapolis who have shown bravery and honor above and beyond what should ever be asked of any citizen. We owe to the 13 generations of patriots who came before us, to leave this nation better than we found it. We owe it to the scared little girl who writes her darkest fears in a Google doc.
What she writes may one day become the cautionary tale about what happens when you allow evil to fester in the heart of a great nation. How temporary that nation's safety, how conditional its prosperity, how precious and fragile its values truly are. But she might also write about the strength and optimism of the millions of ordinary people who came to the nation's defense in its darkest hour.
The burden of history’s errors is ours.
And we MUST take it.
Impeach. Convict. Remove.
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