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Indivisible says its goal is "to train one million people in the strategic logic and practice of non-cooperation, as well as the basics of community organizing and campaign design."
Progressive advocacy organization Indivisible is launching an ambitious new campaign aimed at training more than one million organizers to oppose the policies of U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration.
Over the next several weeks, Indivisible will be hosting online organizing sessions as part of its One Million Rising initiative, which it describes as "a national effort to train one million people in the strategic logic and practice of non-cooperation, as well as the basics of community organizing and campaign design."
Indivisible this year has already organized high-profile nationwide protests this year including the "Hands Off" and "No Kings" events that were attended by millions of Americans. However, it says that its aim with One Million Rising is to go beyond big one-day mobilizations to create more sustained local campaigns throughout the United States that would fight the Trump agenda on a daily basis.
In its message promoting the event, Indivisible emphasizes that "it'll take all of us" to mobilize against the Trump administration and added that this effort "is how we build people power that can't be ignored."
Indivisible held its first One Million Rising session last Wednesday and a recording of the session is available to watch on YouTube. The next session will be held on Wednesday, July 30 and will focus on "how you can lead a discussion with others and get them on board with taking action in your community" and will also help attendees organize their first "community resistance gathering" in the span of two weeks or less.
The third and final session, scheduled for Wednesday, August 13, will have attendees "onboarded to basic campaign design" where they will "learn how to implement it locally as well as get plugged into our next national campaign work."
Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, recently told publication Axios that Indivisible's new campaign shows that it's entering a second stage in its approach to organizing.
"That outrage is still there, but now it's going to be funneled and channeled into strategies and tactics on how we actually make change in the government," she explained. "As more and more protests happen, local, state, and federal elected officials will feel uncomfortable maintaining the stance they have."
And yet, as he was elected by the people, we need no revolution to overthrow him. What we must do is reclaim democracy for the common good and put back together what the MAGA movement has smashed.
Donald Trump seems to think he is a king.
On June 14, I joined with citizens across the country to loudly declare “No Kings!
At the same time, Trump is not a king. For while he inherited great wealth, he did not inherit the political power he now wields with such cruelty and contempt for the law.
Trump, alas, is the elected President of the United States.
Well over 77 million citizens voted for him, after experiencing his Covid response, his two impeachments, his civil and criminal convictions, and his failed administration. After all that, those millions of our fellow citizens elected him to the highest office in the country for a second time.
As we celebrate this July 4, it is important to emphasize the ways that Trump’s presidency stands as an affront and a danger to those core values of the Declaration that have long animated democratic struggles...
Trump is indeed much more dangerous than any monarch, precisely because he was elected after a multi-year campaign (kings do not campaign) that consisted of angry rhetoric and violent incitement and very clear promises to do exactly what he is now doing, a campaign that generated substantial popular support and even enthusiasm. There is something paradoxical about this: claiming to represent “We the People,” Trump is laying waste to the foundations of the very constitutional democracy that authorizes his power—much like dictators of the past, including Mussolini and Hitler, did a century ago, and Viktor Orban and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan do today.
The U.S. was not a constitutional democracy in 1776. But it became one, over time, because of the struggles of social movements that regarded the Declaration of Independence as “a charter of liberty” and sought to make real its promise—to secure human rights for all, and a government legitimated by popular consent. A nation, as Lincoln famously put it, “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” and challenged to sustain “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
As we celebrate this July 4, it is important to emphasize the ways that Trump’s presidency stands as an affront and a danger to those core values of the Declaration that have long animated democratic struggles—which makes it all the more galling that he continues to insist that he, along with his recently reinstated “1776 Commission,” is its chief defender.
The rhetoric of popular revolt or revolution is misleading precisely because Trump is a democratically elected president and is neither a king nor a dictator—at least not yet.
On June 14, I nodded approvingly as I heard fellow demonstrators rightly invoke the liberatory rhetoric of the Declaration’s Preamble. But I blanched when this line was loudly repeated as a call to action: “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
I bow to no one in my opposition to Trump, and I truly want to see him gone as soon as possible. Given his administration’s rapid-fire assaults on liberal democracy, I fully appreciate the mobilizational power of those “No Kings” appeals to the rhetoric of popular revolt. And it must be stated: those who embrace this rhetoric do so only rhetorically; it is not anywhere accompanied by incitements to violence or calls to insurrection.
At the same time, the rhetoric of popular revolt or revolution is misleading precisely because Trump is a democratically elected president and is neither a king nor a dictator—at least not yet. Trump is what historians call a “conservative revolutionary.” Seeking to destroy the progressive achievements of past decades, and to restore a mythic lost “greatness,” it is he who seeks to alter or abolish the current political system, and it is we who must prevent him from succeeding, by defending constitutional democracy, whatever its deficiencies.
Recall that the January 6, 2021 insurrection was justified as a second American Revolution. On that morning, MAGA Congresswoman Lauren Boebert ttweeted “Today is 1776.” Congressman Jody Hice followed a few hours later, tweeting “this is our 1776 moment.” The rallying cry was heard. And, led by Proud Boys and Three Percenters cosplaying the Minutemen of Lexington and Concord, the “patriotic” mob descended upon the Capitol, doing their part to prevent “Biden the Usurper” from becoming president. Days later, the Philadelphia Inquirer profiled Jim Sinclair, a 38-year-old home restoration contractor from Bensalem, Pennsylvania, who traveled to Washington to participate in the “Stop the Steal” march. “Freedom!!!!!!!” Sinclair posted on Facebook. “It’s 1776, the American people have ears and eyes,” he declared. “We will not accept this fraudulent election.” Politico reported that online social media traffic among extremists in the lead-up to the insurrection frequently alluded to the precedent of 1776.
This is the rhetoric of civil war. And it attacks the fundamental premise of our constitutional democracy—the legitimacy of political contestation.
Also recall that the highbrow conservative luminaries from Hillsdale College and the Claremont Institute who comprised Trump’s “1776 Commission” and revere “The Founding Fathers” either directly supported this insurrection or gave it intellectual cover. The “Stop the Steal” movement that powered Trump’s 2024 victory frequently invoked the “spirit of ’76.” Claiming to represent a “resistance” to the supposedly “totalitarian Biden regime,” MAGA ideologues were quite amenable to extra-legal action in the service of “regime change,” in the event that “the Democrat Party” succeeded in 2024. If you doubt this, take a look at Claremont Institute Fellow Kevin Slack’s 2023 book War on the American Republic: How Liberalism Became Despotism, which floats the idea of a new—and very much armed—American Revolution. Discussing the book in The American Mind, a MAGA journal, Claremont fellow Glenn Ellmers dispassionately discusses “Revolutionary Necessity,” quoting Jefferson on “prudence” and gently urging caution because “the regime” would love to crush a revolution, and “one should embark on a revolution only when there is a reasonable expectation, and plan for, a better arrangement.” In other words, you need to really be sure you can succeed before you try to overthrow the “despotism” of liberal democracy.
This is the rhetoric of civil war. And it attacks the fundamental premise of our constitutional democracy—the legitimacy of political contestation. Trump won the 2024 election. And so, instead of taking to the streets—as they might have done had Trump lost—MAGA ideologues, armed with their own revolutionary manifesto, Project 2025, have taken control of the Executive Branch of the federal government. And they are using it to wage war on legal institutions, universities, immigrants both documented and undocumented, sexual minorities, and political critics of all kinds.
This July Fourth, we ought to recall heroes and heroines of the past—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Eugene V. Debs, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others—who led the fight to realize a robustly democratic vision of the Declaration. And then, using the hard-won civil and political liberties still at our disposal, we ought to rededicate ourselves to winning back political power democratically, so that, in the words of Lincoln, “government of, by, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.” For if the MAGA agenda succeeds, we can say goodbye to civil rights, civil liberties, and democracy itself. It would be a cruel irony indeed if future July 4 celebrations were to become celebrations of the MAGA illiberalism that warms Donald Trump’s shriveled heart.
It seemed to offer a genuine sense of how deeply disturbed so many Americans are by a president, or do I indeed mean a “king,” who wants to be able to do anything he madly desires without opposition from anyone.
How strange. I’ve been going to demonstrations for a long, long while now. I began once upon a distant time in opposition to the nightmarish all-American war in Vietnam. And almost 60 years later, that war, in some sense, has come home. Hence, the other day, I found myself at the “No Kings” demonstration in New York City, one of more than 2,000 (yes, 2,000!) across this country of ours at which millions—yes, again, literally millions!—of Americans reportedly turned out. These days, in New York where I live, such demonstrations are often launched from Bryant Park, right behind the classic 42nd Street library on Fifth Avenue, and the marchers normally walk down Fifth for perhaps 20 blocks. The last time I went to a demonstration there, I didn’t walk myself but stood and watched all the marchers with their signs go past me, and it took perhaps 35 minutes or so for them to slowly, slowly do so. That time, which was then typical of such demonstrations, most of the protesters were, like me, also old and white.
No more. The other day at that No Kings march in New York, I wove my way ever so slowly through the crowd to Fifth Avenue and 40th Street just after the march had begun and started watching the demonstrators, packed into literally every square inch of that wide avenue, ever so slowly crawl by me. That crowd ranged from babies in strollers to old people like me, and looked like it represented a distinct cross section of everybody in America, whether by race or age. How many of us were there? Who knows? CBS News simply and vaguely said “tens of thousands,” while the local Fox News station, which obviously had no interest in playing up such demonstrations, still claimed that “tens of thousands of people marched in New York City and the Tri-State area.” If I had to guess, I would say that at least a couple of hundred thousand people crept down Fifth Avenue that day (and on that figure the British Guardian agrees, suggesting “over 200,000” in New York and “millions” nationally).
Probably the single most prominent word on so many of them on that No Kings day was indeed “king,” and it gave you a sense of the greatest fear of all too many Americans that Donald Trump is turning what was once our democracy into his—yes!—perverse kingdom.
After all, when I finally left, almost two hours later, exhausted from just standing there taking notes in an ongoing drizzle, the last of the crowd hadn’t even made it from 40th Street onto a still utterly packed Fifth Avenue (as it had been from the moment I arrived), with that parade of anti-Trump protestors still just creeping along. To depart, in fact, I had to literally weave my way through a still-impressive crowd of No Kings demonstrators with a typical array of signs still waiting to join the march. In short, that demonstration, just one of thousands across the country, was beyond huge! And signs? I watched what must all too literally have been thousands of homemade signs go by me, while listening to endless periodic chants from the crowd.
It was, I have to say, quite something, even for someone like me who has seen so many protests in my lifetime and, in its size, it seemed to offer a genuine sense of how deeply disturbed so many Americans are by a president, or do I indeed mean a “king,” who wants to be able to do anything he madly desires without opposition from anyone. And that included having his own military parade in Washington on that very day, his birthday (though it evidently turned out to be a distinctly underwhelming affair that many spectators evidently left early).
Let me just start—even days after the event occurred—by saying how striking I think it is that increasingly significant numbers of Americans are visibly ever more deeply disturbed by the man who did indeed get only 49.7% of the popular vote in 2024 and, according to CBS News, won the presidency thanks to a “mere 0.15% of voters nationwide” who proved the difference between victory and defeat. Not that you would know it from his ever more disturbing excesses, including that mega-military birthday parade (for both the 250-year-old U.S. Army and the now-79-year-old Donald Trump) with tanks, artillery vehicles, and paratroopers at the cost of at least $25-$45 million taxpayer dollars (at a time when he’s slashing benefits for military veterans) slated to begin in Washington not long after the “No Kings” demonstration I attended ended.
I must admit I found it moving that so many of us wanted to express ourselves in person and through signs and chants. And New York wasn’t faintly alone in responding, among other things, to the criminal way Donald Trump dealt with the first of the recent demonstrations against his rule in Los Angeles. There were, after all, an estimated 2,100 or more No Kings protests across this country that day, in red states and blue ones, red cities and blue ones.
Let me, in that context, give you a little sense of what I saw in an up-close-and-personal fashion. And remember this took place on the street in my hometown, about which, in 2016, Donald Trump, while campaigning for president in Sioux Center, Iowa, had indeed said: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.” Well, fortunately, no shots were fired that afternoon in New York, though, of course, they were indeed fired that very day in truly shocking targeted political assassinations in Minnesota, killing Melissa Hortman, a state legislator, and her husband, and wounding state Senator John A. Hoffman and his wife.
Oh, and as is a typical New York thing to do, I took the subway from my neighborhood to the stop nearest the protest site. And the subway car I entered turned out to be full of other protestors heading for 42nd street as well, including a woman giving out little American flags, and a couple of people with homemade signs, one of which said: “Stop bullying and lying to and stealing from the American people”; a second said, “impeach Humpty Trumpty”; and a third, “No kings, no tyrants, no fascists, no dictators, dump Trump.” And mind you, that was just a single subway car.
And simply walking the few blocks from the subway stop to the area where the demonstration was to take place, I found myself almost instantly on ever more crowded streets surrounded by people carrying homemade signs and already starting to scribble them down in the little notebook I was carrying with me (along with an umbrella on that distinctly drizzly day). As I was heading there, I even passed a woman who had decorated her umbrella with the words “No Dick… Tator, No Fascists,” and a man with a sign that had an image of George Washington and the words “Democracy, yes, Kleptocracy, no.”
Now, consider what follows my portrait of the mood of that moment. There were literally thousands of signs I watched go past me that day—and mind you, we’re talking about an afternoon when it was lightly raining and not a faintly comfortable moment to demonstrate. So, here’s just a little potpourri of some of the ones I scribbled down. Probably the single most prominent word on so many of them on that No Kings day was indeed “king,” and it gave you a sense of the greatest fear of all too many Americans that Donald Trump is turning what was once our democracy into his—yes!—perverse kingdom.
Most of the signs I saw had clearly been written or drawn by hand, sometimes with images added. Here are just a few of the ones that caught my eye (or were short enough that I could scribble them down before they passed me by): “King Trump, you’re fired!”; “Immigrants belong, Kings be gone!”; “ICE is the new SS” (a reference, of course, to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi paramilitary outfit); “Deportation without due process is tyranny”; “King Tut, King Coal, Carole King, Not a king” (with an image of Trump, of course); “No kings since 1776”; “Yes, masks, no kings” (a sign held by a man wearing an N-95 Covid-era mask of the sort that I still often wear myself); “When cruelty becomes normal, compassion looks radical”; “The real criminal is in the White House”; “Elect a clown, expect a circus”; “Not my dictator”; “This American girl says no to kings”; “No kings for these old queens” (signs held by two men); “ICE burn in hell”; “Where is Melania from?”; one with no words, just Trump holding a bloody knife in one hand and the cut off, bleeding head of the Statue of Liberty in the other; “Your only throne is a golden toilet”; “Don’t be a chicken in a coup!” (with a yellow chicken doll hanging on the sign); “If she was president, we’d all be at brunch right now” (with a photo of former Vice President Kamala Harris); “Trump lies while America dies”; “It’s really bad, even I’m out here”; “Two paths and America chooses the psychopath”; “Rebelling against tyrants since 1776”; “Without immigrants, Trump would have no wives”; “The cruelty is the point”; “Elect an ass, expect shit”; “Deport Trump!”; “ICE belongs in Margueritas, not schools”; “Preserve PBS”; “Impeach diaper Don”; “Not a king, just a taco” (a reference to the phrase “Trump Always Chickens Out”); “America wasn’t great in 1768” (with an image of British King George III); “The Mayflower was full of immigrants”; “Trump cut my social security and went golfing”; “Heil, no!”; “Immigrants make America great!”; “Faux-King joke” (with a ludicrous crowned Trump image); “The greatest threat we face is not simply their actions. But our silence—Cory Booker”; “Trump lies while America dies”; and, of course, tons of “No Kings!”
Yes, in the city that Donald Trump once considered his own, it couldn’t have been clearer that it truly wasn’t faintly his anymore.
And here were some of the things that parts of the crowd began chanting in unison as they walked by me: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Donald Trump has got to go!”; “Money for education, not deportation!”; “No KKK, No fascist USA, No ICE!”; “Say it loud, say it clear, ICE is not welcome here!”; “Our streets! Our streets!”; “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here!”; “This is not what democracy looks like!”; “No ICE, no ICE, no KKK, no Fascist USA!”; “Tell me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!”; “Whose street? Our street!”
Yes, in the city that Donald Trump once considered his own, it couldn’t have been clearer that it truly wasn’t faintly his anymore.
And despite what had happened in Los Angeles, though the police were there in significant numbers (as they always are at such demonstrations), they in no way took center stage. Yes, Mayor Eric Adams claimed that more than 34,000 police had been mobilized for the demonstrations in New York. Still, I saw just a couple of police cars with their red lights flashing as I first approached Fifth Avenue and 40th Street and then a group of perhaps 20 policemen (and at least one policewoman) as I was heading back down that street on my way home. Otherwise, at least as far as I could see, they weren’t overly evident. And, again, it was New York City, so no local official had just been assassinated (as in Minnesota that day) and, unlike in San Francisco or Culpeper, Virginia, no car tried to hit any protestors in that march; nor, as in Austin, Texas, had the police told local officials not to attend such a protest because of a threat to them related to the Minnesota assassinations.
So, at least for me, and possibly millions of other Americans, No Kings Day proved an event to remember. Yes, in truth, I still find it hard to believe that we have three and a half more years of King Donald to go (and when, like me, you’re 80 years old, it becomes ever harder to imagine living through those years to another, possibly better future). Still, being at that demonstration was a good reminder that those of us who see in Donald Trump’s version of America an increasingly menacing threat to freedom are anything but alone.