Opinion: Resistance Alone Won't Save Us. We Need Radical Action.
In the wake of the Trump administration’s decision to incarcerate thousands of immigrant children after they were forcibly separated from their parents, a new wave of protests targeting administration officials has taken shape.
After denying that any family separation policy was in effect, a straightforward lie, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was protested at a Mexican restaurant in Washington, D.C. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who lies to the press and the American people every time she holds a so-called briefing, was asked to leave by the co-owner of a restaurant in the western part of Virginia.
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) added fuel to the fire, calling on citizens to “create a crowd and push back” on any member of the Trump Cabinet they see in public.
President Donald Trump responded on Twitter, calling Waters “an extraordinarily low IQ person.”
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called for “unity from sea to shining sea.”
And now, Waters has been forced to cancel events this weekend after receiving death threats.
Time and again, we are witnessing the conventional political world struggle to coexist with an unconventional president willing to use any means necessary to impose his will on the United States. The result has been an uninspiring and ineffective resistance to the Trump agenda. Using conventional tactics to try and stop this unconventional presidency is a recipe for failure.
Organized marches like the Women’s March, the March for Our Lives or this weekend’s Families Belong Together are terrific, but that cannot be the full measure of our pushback against the cult of Trump.
Actions like Thursday’s demonstration in Washington, where hundreds of women were arrested at the Capitol to protest migrant family separations, are a good start. We need more spontaneous acts of civil disobedience. More boycotts. More strikes. More disruptions. More than marching on the weekend.
In the 500-plus days that Trump has occupied the Oval Office, our country has endured an all-out assault on the Constitution.
After meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, Trump declared that the media, is “our country’s biggest enemy.” Trump started a war with NFL players after they exercised their constitutionally protected rights to protest racism in America by refusing to stand for the national anthem. And earlier this week, Trump called for the suspension of due process in immigration cases.
Mind you, it was George Washington who once cautioned that if the freedom of speech is taken away, “dumb and silent we may be led like sheep to the slaughter.”
Trump has taken actions that undermine the very essence of our country. He has endorsed a racist Senate candidate in Virginia who would like to return America to pre-Civil War conditions. He has justified the incarceration of children and their forcible separation from their parents by using the specter of national security to justify his subhuman actions. Trump is clearly unfamiliar with Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
While Trump’s actions are grotesque, his words are even more cause for alarm. He routinely and flagrantly lies to the American people ― 6.5 lies per day, or 3,251 falsities between taking office and June 1 of this year, according to The Washington Post.
Samuel Adams once said, “The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending at all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks.”
The president of the United States is presiding over the systematic deconstruction of our way of life and governance. We have an obligation to fight back. Civility sounds nice and ideal, but that’s not the world we live in, and every day that goes by, the cult of Trump is marching us toward a point of no return.
Our country was born from the spirit of revolution. Right now, we are being subjected to the dangerous whims of a tyrannical thug. Lives are being destroyed. Liberties are being undermined. All the while, the political establishment in Washington, Democrats included, is calling for peace and unity.
If what we’ve seen in the last year and a half isn’t enough to warrant an escalating wave of protests, what does?
Kurt Bardella is a HuffPost columnist. He is a former spokesman and senior adviser for former House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Calif.) and Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter: @kurtbardella
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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
