by Jim Hodgson

I feel some relief this morning by two newsletters from U.S. activists that arrived in my email.

One is from “Stop The Coup 2025,” a campaign to fight Project 2025 (the Republicans’ plan for the next Trump administration). It has a toolkit for community organizers that includes a section, “Spotlight on Risk Preparedness/Criminalization/Underground Survival Tips.” It discusses the importance of organizations and individuals taking steps now to prepare and assess their vulnerability to Project 2025’s agenda and learning from LGBTQIA+ activists in other places who have been forced to live and organize under the radar due to state-sanctioned criminalization.

Here’s a bit more information about Project 2025:

Project 2025 has a radical anti-democracy, anti-diversity, anti-gender agenda to:

• systematically dismantle the federal government – a soft coup
• give the next Republican president new “supreme powers” – an autocracy
• use Executive Orders to “legally” reverse many of our civil rights
• use the military to help clamp down on domestic dissent
• criminalize & erase gender & LGBTQIA+ identity from government protection
• reverse racial equality, attack diversity, and reverse environmental gains
• replace secular education with Christian theocracy and a pro-life agenda
• recruit and train 20,000 conservatives for government jobs 
• Use “Schedule F” to remove 50,000 civil servants 
• Require government “Loyalty Pledges” to an extremist right-wing agenda 
• Reverse historic US defense policy of deterrence to offense 
• Require US foreign policy, USAID to align with pro-life agenda 
• LAUNCH THEIR 180-DAY ADMINISTRATION TAKEOVER ON January 20, 2025

The other newsletter that brought hope to my inbox today came from Codepink, the U.S. network of feminist peace activists. I’ve worked with them in the past to counter the harm caused by U.S. sanctions in Venezuela, Cuba and elsewhere, and some of my colleagues have worked with them for peace in the Korean peninsula and the Middle East. Part of the message today:

We don’t want to waste your time with platitudes about how everything will be okay or even talk about the breakdown of the election. We think it’s more useful to go off what we know for certain now: Donald Trump is going to be president in January. 

But, a majority of Americans oppose U.S. support for Israel, and don’t want their tax dollars funding weapons that murder innocent people and destroy the earth. A greater majority of Americans oppose the U.S. starting new wars. It’s okay to feel deflated and discouraged, but don’t forget that the people are on our side – all we have to do is reach them.  

We will continue to do what we have always done: educate by exposing horrific violence carried out by those in power, activate a movement for peace, and cultivate local communities that represent the world we want to live in. Solidarity is our best friend. Finding new and creative ways to scratch at power is our path forward.

Last time, and this time: concern for rights of refugees

Back in 2016, I was in Antofagasta, Chile, when I learned that Donald Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton and won the U.S. election. The news was unexpected, just like now. 

I was in Chile’s far north to meet and show solidarity with Chilean Methodists who were working with migrants who had come from Colombia and other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, including Haiti. 

Indeed, a great deal of my personal and professional life has been devoted to work with refugees and other people who are forced to flee their homelands because of various political, economic and environmental causes. 

Now I am in north-western Chiapas, having crossed in recent weeks several of the “red states” where support for Trump is strong.

In the wake of the election, pundits point out that Trump weaponized ‘fake news.’ He played to machismo and racists and to people who haven’t a clue what being Trans even means. That he won over a smart, articulate, experienced woman of colour after being convicted of crimes and successfully sued for sexual assault is an indictment of U.S. democracy.

Some, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, point as well to the Democratic Party establishment which again defended the status quo. “It should come as no surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”

As ever, don’t expect the Democratic Party to save us. Now is the time for grassroots action.

For Natasha Lennard, writing in The Intercept, the answer is radical action from the grassroots: 

“Far-right policies and parties tend to win the day when so-called centrists take up conservative platforms to purportedly capture disaffected white voters and thus keep the far-right at bay; the upshot is treating conservative nationalism as the fulcrum of all politics. This is what the Harris campaign did, particularly when it came to immigration. At best, as with Britain’s currently ruling Labour Party, the Tories might have lost, but right-wing politics have been reconfigured as the normalized center.”