Remarks for the rally that didn’t happen on October 26, 2025

 (rain happened instead)

Welcome, everyone. Let’s begin by saying that after today we will move to a winter program. As the storms of the last two days make clear, we have to take winter weather into account. We cannot depend on holding rallies outdoors. So we’re exploring a panoply of alternatives. If there are national calls for action and protest in person, we’ll of course comply when weather allows.

We’re planning to hold meetings indoors to keep the resistance alive and strong, and we’re also exploring the idea of a YouTube channel to hold live virtual rallies. 

Communication among us all will be key. For now, we depend on you to keep in touch by checking the website (PoulsboforAll.com) and the Facebook page, Poulsbo for All, for information about upcoming events and projects.

By no means does suspending outdoor protests imply that the resistance must slow down. We plan gatherings for book and film discussions and invited speakers. We will enlist your help to establish neighborhood networks for mutual aid, to organize food drives to support our most vulnerable neighbors, particularly immigrants and out-of-work federal employees. We will organize boycotts locally (while supporting local businesses), and participate in national ones.

We will participate in general strikes when they’re called, and make sure that friends and family and neighbors participate too. Another thing we can do together is show up as a powerful presence at City Council meetings when it strategically matters, to promote initiatives that protect all residents and to remind our local government that they are OUR employees. Please stay connected and let us know your ideas. This is what democracy looks like!

It has been a deeply disturbing couple of weeks. The disgraces range from

✔︎the extremely ill-advised war starting up with Venezuela, to

✔︎the continued brutal arrests and deportations of hardworking immigrant neighbors and their families, to

✔︎ robbing the American people blind through nonsensical tariffs that we end up paying for and

✔︎ending subsidies for Obamacare for 22 million people and

✔︎the gutting of Medicaid and

✔︎taking away SNAP benefits for 42 million, to  

✔︎ the pileup of lies and shameless propaganda spread on shill news stations and websites, to

✔︎ the diminishing availability of information on the nation’s economic status, employment, health policies, trade policies. We could fret over

✔︎the shamefully baseless legal prosecutions and persecutions of Trump’s political enemies, ✔︎the appalling video Trump released showing a crowned Donald piloting a jet fighter plane and unloading tons of shit on his own country. Most soul-crushing, producing shock even beyond the capacity for outrage, was

✔︎Trump’s desecration of the White House, bypassing any normal approval process--demolishing the entire East Wing, with all its history and symbolic resonance. The apparent purpose of it? to make way for

✔︎ his pet project, not the People’s House but the Billionaires’ House, a 300 million-dollar, 90,000 square-feet gold-plated ballroom that will certainly never welcome you or me.

Despite the Administration’s seemingly overwhelming attacks on freedom and decency--

assaults meant to convince us that resistance is useless--good things are happening.

At the top of the list: the fact that Americans showed up en masse last week, seven million strong, to cry NO KINGS! and protest these assaults on democracy and sanity. We’re not sure how someone arrived at the overall figure of seven million, because surely no one counted the 3,172 in Poulsbo and hundreds and thousands more in countless other towns across our nation. In any case, no one but the Führer argues that the gargantuan NO KINGS turnout was a “joke” and protesters were “paid” and there weren’t that many protesters after all and we’re violent terrorists.

There’s a famous sequence in Eisenstein’s classic film Potemkin, made a hundred years ago in 1925 to commemorate the Bolshevik revolution. At the end of a horrendous scene of massacre, three shots symbolically show the people waking up to rise against the tyrannical tsarist regime. The film cuts from a statue of a sleeping lion, to a statue of a lion sitting up, to a statue of a lion standing strong and alert. Three static shots edited together create the impression of movement, the impression that a lion is rising up. The lions, the people, are awakening to their power.

But we the people in 2025 cannot stop at our awakening. We know that one big national protest will not end this regime. What last Saturday’s protest did accomplish was to make protest cool, to make it mainstream, to let hesitators understand that it’s the majority that needs them to join in resisting, not just passively wait for change to magically happen without them. We’re in this together, we’ve got to do it together, and our lives and our freedom literally depend on a sustained mass movement.

NO KINGS is not the only encouraging thing going on. We’ve seen the journalists of almost every news agency walk out of the White House press corps rather than sign the Administration’s loyalty requirements. We’ve also seen seven out of nine universities refuse to go along with Trump’s bribes and threats to limit their academic freedoms in exchange for money. We’ve seen courts stand up to the Administration’s lawless lawsuits. We’re seeing the vigorous rise of alternative sources of information, analysis, and insight stepping in brilliantly where the corporate media have bowed to the White House’s pressure. We’ve seen big-city neighborhoods blow hons and whistles to warn their neighbors when ICE thugs arrive. We’ve seen courageous military officers resign rather than obey Hegseth’s unconstitutional new regulations. We’ve seen food banks and other aid groups devising new ways to try to meet the massive new demands for food and supplies as the shutdown and the persecutions are starting to impoverish more and more people.

What are we going to do in Kitsap over the next few months? First of all, we can’t lose momentum. We’re aware of the Administration’s tactic of “flooding the zone,” assailing us with so many outrages on so many fronts, because they want us to lose heart, get discouraged, feel alone and helpless. We’re not going to let that happen!  Rather than sit through the long winter months, we’re going to meet often, educate ourselves, understand the racism and greed propelling the criminal administration, and we’re going to band together to fight their hateful strategies. We’re going to educate others; we’ll be a powerful presence at City Hall, we’ll assemble for actions in meeting halls and parking lots. We need to get trained and set up digital security to protect our communications. As our more complacent neighbors see their healthcare slip away, the price of groceries and household goods skyrocket and start to make life unlivable, the garish ballroom go up at the White House to entertain Trump’s billionaire donors while their own bank accounts dry up, the tide will change.

So, self-education and educating others. We’ll facilitate that process as much as we can, but we need you to make it happen. And when the strikes and boycotts (even as we support local businesses) really get going, our power over the billionaires will become clear. Can we do all this without encountering violence? We can’t know in advance. The road ahead is a hard and bumpy one, but we have to take it—the alternative is to remain passive and end up in a nightmarish regime deprived of the freedoms we’ve taken for granted for 250 years.

We must do all of this without violence. We must help to awaken the sleeping giant, the sleeping lions, the American people!