How do we best translate unprecedented public outcry into the raw exercise of power needed to stop Trump and his allies?

At 9 AM Pacific Time Monday morning, Donald Trump will have been President of the United States for exactly ten days. In that time, the Seattle area will already have seen four major protests that each involved thousands of people (Inauguration Day, the women’s march, SeaTac, and tonight’s immigration rally). The SeaTac protest. organized in hours and viral in social media, got up to ten thousand people to drop their evening plans to rush to the airport. The women’s march was arguably the largest demonstration in Seattle history. At a fifth protest on the University of Washington campus, an anti-fascist peacekeeper was shot and critically wounded by a man wearing Trump paraphernalia. And similar record-setting demonstrations have erupted in every major city in the US, in all 50 states, and dozens of foreign countries.

And both Trump and the resistance to him are just getting started. We haven’t even gotten to ObamaCare repeal, Medicare & Social Security privatization, attacks on women’s reproductive health, environmental degradation, attacks on public education and unions, massive tax cuts for the rich, repeal of gay marriage, torture, civil liberties and civil rights rollbacks, new voter suppression initiatives, the War on Drugs, the War on Science, military and diplomatic idiocy, a new nuclear arms race, or any of the countless other things likely coming soon, some of them very soon.

Trump, his team, and congressional allies are seeking to move quickly on all of these fronts, and others we don’t expect. Many of these issues will mobilize entirely new constituencies, adding to the folks who’ve rallied and marched already.

At some point, likely very soon, the fact that scores of different outrages will have energized people will become the political and cultural narrative. All of the resistance will itself become the issue – and the right to protest will likely come under attack as well, spawning even more resistance. (Some Trump allies have already suggested cracking down on protesters.)

Just as there will be countless issues, there will also be countless demands; that can’t be helped. But just as the protests are likely to merge in their political and media narrative into one movement, we need to be thinking as well about what the unifying thing is that we want – and how best to achieve it.

The unifying immediate demand is fairly obvious, and is already showing up in protest signs and social media surrounding all of these issues: Donald Trump must go. But how?

Forcing Trump Out

There are, legally, three ways in which Trump’s removal from office can happen within the American political system. He could resign; he could be impeached for “high crimes and misdemeanors”; or he could be removed under Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, which provides for replacing a president who is unfit to serve for any reason, from health to mental issues to dangerous levels of incompetence.

Resignation is the least likely, and, as with Richard Nixon 43 years ago, is only conceivable as a face-saving action if one of the other remedies appears to Trump to be inevitable. Trump’s combination of megalomania and delusion mean that he’d never willingly leave a job like this – where he is literally the center of global attention every day – and he’d likely be impossible to convince of his vulnerability to legal removal even if every other elected official in the country were aligned against him. That leaves impeachment and Section Four.

The bar for both is extremely high. Impeachment is the only way a sitting president can be held accountable for breaking the law, and it’s only happened twice in US history – to Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton – both for political reasons having little to do with the alleged crimes in question. And in both cases, the impeachment was unsuccessful. As for Section Four, the entire 25th Amendment, enacted in 1967 after JFK’s assassination to change the protocol for presidential succession, has never been used.

Can Trump’s transgressions rise to that very rare level? After only ten days, it appears almost inevitable. Already, in terms of crimes, there are serious, multi-agency investigations into whether Trump or his campaign violated economic sanctions – or compromised national security – or encouraged espionage or foreign tampering with the presidential election – in meetings, phone calls, and other contacts the Trump campaign had with representatives of the Russian government. Multiple ethics complaints have already been filed over Trump’s (and several of his Cabinet members’) failure to divest themselves of conflicting business interests. Trump also faces credible accusations of using his position to influence how foreign governments treat his companies. Words like “corruption” and “blackmail” keep coming up. And that’s on top of all of the other alleged criminal behavior we already knew about before the election: the sexual assaults; the defrauding of contractors and swindling of Trump University students; the organized crime connections in the US, Russia, and elsewhere; multiple possible tax crimes; and much, much more.

Trump now has enormous power, but he can’t stop all of these investigations. And as the old political cliche goes, the coverup is always worse than the crime. Secretive and vindictive, Trump has already demonstrated his eagerness to blow off legal requirements he doesn’t like. And a man who is apparently incapable of discerning fact from his own fantasies seems like a prime candidate to get tripped up over, say, lying under oath, the transgression used to impeach both Johnson and Clinton.

His fantastical beliefs are also one of several reasons Trump is already giving enemies a case for his being unfit to serve. Diagnosing Trump’s mental health problems – narcissist, megalomaniac, sociopath, and more – is so common now in the national discourse that it’s hardly controversial. When a moderate mainstream elite columnist can casually write, as the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof did today in referring to the entirety of Trump’s record thus far, that the new president was either a liar or a crackpot, “unfit to serve” doesn’t seem like much of a stretch. And the evidence will keep arrived daily, delivered in a firehose.

But just because a convincing case can be made that Trump is a crook, a loon, or both, and the mechanisms exist for using those circumstances to remove him from office, doesn’t mean they will be used. That’s where political strategy matters, starting now.

The Anti-Trump Nation

Impeachment requires a majority vote in the U.S. House of Representatives, and a two-thirds vote for conviction in the U.S. Senate. Section Four has an even higher bar; removal is initiated by the Vice-President and “a majority of the principal officers of the executive departments” (basically, Trump’s cabinet), and then requires a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress.

Both houses of Congress are currently Republican-controlled, and in both cases, the majority caucus is dominated by its most radical members. This means that, in practice, removing Trump from office would require substantial support from even the more unhinged regions of the Republican Party.

At the current rate, that’s not inconceivable. Two weeks ago, in an article I wrote on how to beat Trump, I noted that he has two enormous tactical vulnerabilities: overreach and divisions within his own party. Within just the first ten days, we’ve seen both.

Despite their fear of primary challenges from their Trump-loving base, a number of elected Republican officials have spoken out against some of Trump’s early moves, particularly his immigration orders. Moreover we’ve also seen constituent groups that are normally rock-solid Republican express alarm. Christian evangelicals were widely appalled at Trump’s prioritization of Christian victims of persecution for refugee status; active missionary projects were equally alarmed at the refugee and immigration actions. And, of course, conservative immigrants are directly impacted.

In Congress, many of Trump’s plans – most notably so far the Mexican wall and the call for rapid repeal of the Affordable Care Act – have concerned both fiscal conservatives and the big business interests that many Republicans serve. Those corporations also often rely on trade agreements like NAFTA and on non-citizen employees. The military-loving wing of Trump’s party is up in arms over his disrespect to the CIA’s dead, his nomination of radical incompetents for critical military leadership positions, his disregard for the American tradition of civilian control of the military, and, this weekend, his naming of a self-identified white nationalist with zero national security experience, Stephen Bannon, to a seat on the National Security Council. Trump has also already made powerful enemies in the executive branch: career military and intelligence officials and top agency staff who are by definition politically savvy and accustomed to working with Congress to get things done. And even among avid Trump supporters, you’ll find people who are patriots first and willing to act as such if the president is clearly either acting criminally or badly harming the country. Or both.

The Republican Party under Trump has unprecedented power to enact a radical agenda that a majority of Americans – for members of Congress and for the presidency – voted against. That power was achieved by gerrymandering Congressional districts, the disproportionate weight the Senate gives to small rural states, and the matching bias of the Electoral College. In the face of majority popular opposition, the Republican agenda can only hold if the party stays unified. Ten days in and the cracks are already visible.

The Bigger Project

Jettisoning Donald Trump will require our popular movement, both individually and organizationally, to make common cause with conservatives we wouldn’t normally work with. At the same time, removing Trump gives us a Christian jihadist, Michael Pence, as President. And at least until the 2018 midterms, Pence – who is far more experienced and competent in understanding how government works – would have the same radical congressional majority to work with.

The goal of any drive to replace Trump, then, needs to use his disgrace to make the Republican brand toxic in general, so as to overcome the gerrymandered Republican control of Congress. Between now and those 2018 midterms – or 2020, if Congress stays in Republican hands next year – the more that investigations and dealing with popular resistance can consume the limited time of Congress, the better. But we’ll need to work with some of those same people and groups to remove Trump.

The goal isn’t just to get rid of Trump, but to destroy Trumpism – which I’ll loosely define as the 30-year campaign of “alternative facts,” racism and bigotry, fear, and economic resentment that Republicans have used to fire up their base, a project that has gotten steadily more radical and reality-challenged over time. In this goal, we have several clear advantages: an ever-more-diverse and tolerant population, political control of pretty much every major economic center in the country, and the passion that comes when things we deserve and depend on are denied to us. And, of course, Trump’s radicalism and incompetence is our best recruiter. We are everywhere, and in combating a national regime that only respects power, we have the power to have an enormous impact on this country’s economy, culture, and politics.

A Few Suggested Guidelines

We can, if we choose to, make this country ungovernable. If the Trump impulse toward fascism moves much farther, combined with his impulse to punish and humiliate enemies real and perceived, that might be what it comes to. Already, this weekend, California Gov. Jerry Brown is threatening to withhold money from the country’s most populous and economically powerful state, money that normally goes to the federal government. Events are moving quickly.

In supporting the acts of elected officials who are needed to remove Trump and the threat of future Trumps, however, the bitter divide gripping the country needs to be healed enough for us to make common cause with at least some of the people on “the other side.” And common cause, the idea that we’re all in this together, is also the key to disempowering the divide and punch down tactics of Trumpism. Some people are irredeemable and simply need to be politically neutralized; overcoming a generation of right wing propagandizing is a long-term project. But in the short term, as we look use the tsunami of individual issues to both remove Trump and reverse the broader reactionary rise to power, I’d like to propose a few, necessarily incomplete guiding principles. Add your own:

1) Welcome everyone. A lot of people have never protested before in their lives. Some are conservative; many just never paid much attention to politics until they personally got impacted by one or another issue. Focus on our common goals and respect. This is not the time to shame or drive away people because we disagree with them on other issues, or because we got politically engaged before they did or know more. We can’t win without an inclusive movement. We also can’t create a more inclusive society without modeling that ideal ourselves.

2) Don’t get discouraged. Pace yourself; take breaks when you need to. There will be setbacks. Things will be scary at some times, overwhelming or boring at others. We need to take care of ourselves and support each other. Take risks, but be conscious of safety. All of that is, again, also the societal norms we want to encourage.

3) Stay focused. If the goal is to remove Trump, don’t get distracted by police violence or congressional idiocy. If the goal is to, say, save an essential safety net program or act on some other issue, prioritize the leadership of people directly impacted by that issue. A health care rally, for example, is not the time to lecture people on a pipeline; a climate change direct action is not a forum for your homelessness concerns. Check your privileges.

4) Organize, organize, organize! Share information, connect people and groups. Talk with friends, relatives, co-workers, strangers. Do what you can do best, whether it’s donating, offering specialized skills, or simply showing up.

5) Make the connection between popular sentiment and political action. Hold elected officials accountable; tell them what you want, and reward them when they do it. Know what the process is that you want to influence and what the best ways are to influence it. And then tell everyone else.

6) Smile. Rage and fear will take us a long way in getting things done; they also drive away allies we’ll need, and are generally not sustainable in what may be a long struggle. Find joy in things, and above all, remember that standing up for what’s right is also an end in itself. You folks are awesome.

First, the good news: the victim of last Friday night’s shooting outside the Kane Hall appearance of white supremacist Milo Yiannopoulos is recovering from his near-lethal wounds. His condition was upgraded from critical to serious on Sunday, and again to satisfactory on Monday. He’s looking forward to telling his story once he’s sufficiently recovered.

There has been a lot of confusion and misinformation, spread by Yiannopoulos and his allies and then rebroadcast by law enforcement and local media, about what actually happened Friday night. It’s fairly simple. Anti-fascist protesters and Yiannopoulos fans had spent the entire evening verbally, and at times physically, confronting each other. The shooter, decked in pro-Trump regalia, had spent much of the evening trying to instigate such confrontations. When the shooting happened, the victim, acting as a peacekeeper, tried to intercede in a confrontation by physically stepping nonviolently between the shooter and another protester. The victim nearly died for his efforts.

From beginning to end, Yiannopoulos’ appearance at UW, the shooting, and its aftermath raise a number of serious questions:

1) The administration at the University of Washington should never have let Yiannopoulos speak at university facilities in the first place, for two reasons. First, Yiannopoulos’ widely publicized white supremacist views directly violate the university’s Code of Conduct; and secondly, the clear potential for violence between Yiannopoulous’ admirers and protesters.

In general, I support free speech; even hate-mongers like Yiannopoulos have a right to speak publicly. But not when their entire schtick violates the regulations of their host institution, and not when their appearance endangers public safety. Both clearly applied here, and UW’s administration was repeatedly warned on both counts for several weeks ahead of Friday’s appearance. UW administrators bear direct responsibility for this shooting.

2) The actions of the UW police and the additional 80 SPD officers that were called in for the event also contributed directly to thia tragedy. In going to three decades of protests of neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and other hate groups and their representatives, I have rarely seen police fail to physically separate such groups’ adherents and the people protesting them – putting them on opposite sides of a street, or different sides of a building, or simply separated by a police line.

Over a hundred law enforcement officers were present when the shooting happened. What the hell were they doing? From a law enforcement standpoint, the event entrance shouldn’t have been so easy to blockade (and keep blockaded), and the two groups should never have been allowed anywhere near each other. Kane Hall has at least a half-dozen different entrances on three levels. Both as people tried to enter the event, and later when they left, it would have been relatively simple to keep them separated from the protesters. For whatever reason, police failed to take this utterly basic precaution. We know what happened as a result. An anti-fascist peacekeeper should never have had to physically intercede in this kind of melee to begin with.

3) Five hours after the shooting, the shooter and his wife turned themselves in to UW police, reportedly claiming that the shooting was in self-defense. The shooter also reportedly claimed that he thought he was shooting a Yiannopoulus supporter, not a protester. The pair was questioned in the wee hours Saturday morning and almost immediately released.

In those five hours before the shooter turned himself in, detectives had the opportunity to get statements – and photos and video – from dozens of witnesses – not to mention the scores of officers who were already nearby. Even if it was not immediately clear from witness statements and video that the shooter had been a provocateur all evening, and the roles of both he and his victim, there should have been more than enough information to immediately and seriously call into question the shooter’s story, and to cast doubt on whether his situation rose to the legal level of needing to use lethal force in self-defense. Moreover, the shooter also violated a law by carrying his gun onto the UW campus in the first place. (And even if all of that wasn’t clear Saturday morning, it certainly seems to be clear now.)

Suspects can be held while detectives gather evidence and consult with prosecutors. So why was the shooter released so quickly? And why, even afterwards, did official police statements continue to fudge the question of whether the shooter was a Yiannopoulos fan or a protester?

Parenthetically, local media accounts mostly took the police statements at face value, too, even though a number of media outlets had reporters present at the event and also had plenty of time to interview witnesses. Undoubtedly, the actions of both cops and reporters were influenced by their dislike of the black bloc, especially its reputation stemming from Seattle’s annual May Day police riot. That’s no excuse. The facts were relatively clear; the disinformation coming from the Yiannopoulos camp was easily refuted. And yet the shooter was quickly released, and remains free, without having been either charged or publicly identified.

And then, this morning, the Times went ahead and publicly named the victim even though he had requested that media keep his identify anonymous due to his well-founded fear of harassment and threats from Yiannopoulous’ supporters – a tactic they’ve used extensively in the past. The Times‘ decision to name the victim without his permission was made in reckless disregard for his safety. They can’t go out of business soon enough.

4) There will be enormous costs for the victim: huge medical bills, lost work time, legal fees, and all the associated expenses involved in recovering from a serious wound. So far, due to the relatively low-key and often misleading media coverage, donations to help cover those costs have largely come from anti-authoritarian activists and their allies. Both fundraising and publicity about this incident deserve a far wider audience. You can help the victim defray his costs here: https://www.crowdrise.com/medical-fundraiser-for-iww-and-gdc-member-shot-in-seattle.

As for the shooting itself, beyond the hard questions that need to be asked of UW administrators, UW and Seattle police, and local corporate media, people across the country need to know that this happened – that the overt fascism Donald Trump has helped normalize over the past two years can lead and has led directly to the use of deadly force against the targets of fascists’ hate.

For many of us, this is no surprise; as Seattle has gotten steadily wealthier and whiter, hate crimes against people of color, against LGBTQ people, against immigrants, and against religious minorities have increased sharply over the last several years – but much of the general public hasn’t noticed or cared. Now that an unarmed white guy has been shot, perhaps more people will care.

At minimum, other activists and Trump opponents in general, regardless of our ideologies, need to understand that the threat Trumpism represents does not just involve public policy. It also involves at least some of its adherents feeling justified in shooting protesters – or any of the other endless categories of people fascists hate. This sort of violence has already become so normalized that campus administrators can let it happen, law enforcement officials can let it happen and then immediately release the suspect, and media outlets can either misrepresent or whitewash the whole event.

When violence like this becomes normalized and tolerated, more of it happens. Fascists and their sympathizers need to understand that there will be serious consequences for hateful behavior and actions. And their enablers – on campus, in law enforcement, and in corporate media – need to be held accountable as well. We cannot afford to let this crime become yet another item, lost in yesterday’s news. There’s too much at stake.

The New York Times continued its unprecedented, blistering attacks on the new president today. Booman has a pithy summary:

“The New York Times is feeling feisty this morning, going out of their way to point out that the Trump administration’s alternative facts about the inauguration are false in every particular. They also hit the administration with a terrible review of their first days in office from Trump’s own top aides. For good measure, they trashed Sean Spicer, the new press secretary, slapped the president around for not releasing his tax returns, highlighted a new legal challenge that will claim that all foreign payments to Trump-owned companies are violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, and provided more coverage of the massive, global, anti-Trump women’s marches.”

The Washington Post, which styles itself as the hometown newspaper of the federal government, wasn’t much nicer.

There’s been a lot of speculation about why new Press Secretary Sean Spicer went out of his way over the weekend to trumpet provably false assertions about something as trivial as inauguration crowd size, and then Trump surrogates like KellyAnne “alternative facts” Conway doubled down on the tactic yesterday. A lot of progressives seem to want to attribute it to Trump’s narcissism. But a former White House press secretary, writing anonymously over the weekend, had a much more credible and sobering explanation.

The gist of it was the reasonable assumption that when the Trump White House contradicts obvious facts, roughly one-third of Americans will recoil in horror; another one-third, Trump’s base, will draw on their years of “liberal media” and Faux News inoculations and believe Trump; and another third will throw up their hands in despair at the shouting back and forth, decide the truth is unknowable, and tune out.

Trump’s strategy is aimed at this last group – to get as many Americans as possible to tune out and drop out from political engagement, disgusted by the dysfunction. The inauguration crowd size kerfluffle was setting an immediate tone for this strategy. And it’s actually a very smart – if incredibly cynical – strategy.

It’s exactly what you’d expect from a lifelong con artist and serial liar, but it’s not a personality quirk. It’s an intentional strategy to disempower potential opposition. It also, as a bonus, reinforces the conservative frame that government by definition is inefficient and incompetent.

News outlets like the NYT, WaPo and CNN don’t have much choice but to scream bloody murder in an unprecedented way. But now that most Americans can get their news, and facts, slanted in whichever way they like, the screaming just plays into Trump’s hands. His base will be confirmed in their beliefs, the opponents were already opponents, and the rest of us mostly just don’t have the time or patience or stomach for all of this.

The only solution I can think of is personal. Personal contact carries far more credibility with most people than traditional media sources do. Many of you reading this are already politically engaged and following the news. It’s up to us to track all of the nonsense that is already, and will continue to be, spewed at us, and patiently explain to our less engaged friends (who have lives 🙂 ) what is, and is not, reality-based.

That won’t be easy or pleasant. I expect a daily firehose of lies, the likes of which we’ve never seen in a political system not based in Pyongyang. It’s a nauseating job to have to do. But nobody else can do it as effectively. It’s up to us.

Yesterday’s bizarre speech by Donald Trump at CIA headquarters, on his first full day as President of the United States, has set off all kinds of alarm bells about the new president. By turns rambling, detached from reality, and self-aggrandizing, Trump spent much of the 15-minute speech complaining about crowd estimates at his inauguration. His use as a photo backdrop of the CIA’s near-sacred wall of black stars – its memorial to intelligence officers killed in the line of duty – was, probably inadvertently, deeply offensive to the spy community that he had only a week ago essentially called Nazis. Meanwhile, millions marched in the streets against him.

As a new Commander-in-Chief, Trump’s performance should be alarming to everyone, whether you’re a fan of the CIA and the government’s other instruments of power or not. This morning, that – along with all those marchers – is what’s getting all the attention.

But outfits like the CIA don’t generally take getting repeatedly slapped in the face by an idiot passively. Outgoing CIA Director John Brennan is a five-star war criminal who served both Barack Obama and George W. Bush in Deep State leadership positions. Last night, Brennan’s chief of staff publicly quoted him as saying of Trump’s speech that he [Brennan] was “deeply saddened and angered at Donald Trump’s despicable display of self-aggrandizement in front of C.I.A.’s Memorial Wall of Agency heroes…Trump should be ashamed of himself.”

Brennan managed to serve Cabinet-level positions for both Republican and Democratic presidents by being very politic. Launching this sort of angry public attack is unprecedented. And other Agency allies last night were similarly scathing in their responses, as was corporate media coverage.

People like Brennan are politic, but they’re also intensely political. There has always been overlap and rivalry both within and between the government’s instruments of power. Military service agencies have been rivals for centuries, both operationally and for budget money. The same is true for clandestine agencies and for law enforcement agencies.

Since 9-11, with the vast expansion of spending on the American security state, the overlaps have only increased. The Bush/Cheney White House responded to intelligence on Iraq it didn’t like by hugely expanding the size and role of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagon’s in-house intelligence force. The CIA, in turn, became much more militarized and much more operational, de-emphasizing human intelligence-gathering in favor of overseas operations that overlap with military special forces. And electronic intelligence? One of 2016’s most under-reported stories was the official confirmation that the National Security Agency now routinely monitors the electronic communications of all Americans – a practice that not only makes a joke of the 4th Amendment, but that overlaps extensively with the missions of the FBI and with newly militarized local law enforcement agencies.

Everyone wants the same missions and the same dollars, and now you’ve got a new president who, remarkably, has not only no record because he’s never held elected office before, but has also never in his life served in the military or any other public agency. For the first time in U.S. history, America’s national security institutions are facing a completely blank slate from an incoming Commander-in-Chief – moreover, a Commander-in-Chief who literally by the day is alarming the most reality-based of people with his capricious, conspiratorial, and just plain reality-challenged words and actions.

I promise you that none of these agencies are waiting to see what happens. And that, just as much as Trump himself, should scare the hell out of everyone who cares about democratic institutions in this country.

Trump has already been playing favorites, of course. He famously pandered to law enforcement during his campaign, and law enforcement trade groups returned the favor. He nominated Jefferson Beauregard Sessions as U.S. Attorney General, a man rejected 30 years ago for the federal judiciary because even then, as now, he was such a bizarre relic of an outdated version of Southern racism. That pick was not just a middle finger to the #BlackLivesMatter movement, but a signal in general that under Sessions, local and federal law enforcement agencies need no longer worry about Department of Justice investigations of excessive force practices. The gloves are off, a message underscored by Friday’s instant disappearance on the WhiteHouse.gov web site of its pages on civil rights.

Similarly, Trump’s Cabinet nominations showed much favor to the military, naming no less than four retired generals to security state leadership positions and in the process badly eroding this country’s tradition of civilian leadership of the military. But the actual people Trump has nominated are very much fringe figures within the military itself. Among them, they have records of hyper-aggressiveness, belief in conspiracy theories, poor management records, disturbing financial conflicts of interest, and even more disturbing ties to Russia. The tug-of-war for power between Trump’s political hires and the far more sober military brass will be ferocious.

Trump has made it clear he wants to give all of these agencies more money – a lot more. The Republican-controlled Congress feels the same way. But who gets what is still very much up for grabs; the erratic nature of Trump’s picks to lead these agencies compounded matters; and now the erratic, hallucinatory performance of Trump himself at the CIA yesterday, on Day One of his administration, has to have everyone scrambling. As a further variable, below the Cabinet level, Trump’s team hasn’t even nominated yet most of the 690 positions requiring Senate confirmation, including scores in the security state.

If there’s one thing people who’ve spent their lives in hierarchical institutions hate, it’s unpredictability. This is the mother of all unpredictable scenarios. If you’re a senior CIA official, for example, you don’t know whether Trump is going to give you a huge new area of responsibility next week, with money and resources to match, or whether he’ll abolish the agency entirely. Or both. And now you’re probably worried that he doesn’t know, either.

Trump is already eroding civilian control of the military. But what about the reverse? Nobody knows. These kinds of unpredictable, fluid power vacuums are exactly how coups happen, how assassinations happen, and how dictatorships emerge.

The millions of people marching yesterday were a huge and inspiring development. Trump’s CIA speech, and the security state’s response to it, was a less visible, slower moving story, but it’s just as important. And diametrically opposed to the kind of free democratic expression we saw on the streets yesterday.

These are raw battles between at least three very different kinds of power. People power can win these battles, but – as we saw with Arab Spring – it can also lose them very badly. The security state maneuvering undoubtedly going on behind the scenes, this weekend and beyond, is happening rapidly and very far above the heads of yesterday’s marchers. We have the raw numbers. We’d better get organized.

On Friday, Donald J. Trump will become the 45th President of the United States. Every single thing he has done since the election indicates that his narcissism is at risk of becoming megalomania, and he is intent on wielding power as ruthlessly as possible. His appointments to date have been an unprecedented circus of oligarchs, ideological zealots, and incompetents. (And fans of Vladimir Putin.) These are not people much concerned about democracy.

Trump’s party also controls Congress, and in both the House and the Senate, the Republican Caucus is in turn controlled by far-right extremists. Moreover, Trump has stated clearly that he intends to appoint federal judges, including to the Supreme Court, only if they share the ideological extremism he has also favored in his Cabinet nominations.

A majority of state governorships and legislatures are also controlled by the same types of people. They share a hatred of government – except when it can be used to kill or shame people – and a love of punching down. It is reasonable to expect, based on the firehose of WTF the Trump transition team and the first days of this Congress have already let loose with, that there will be so many crises, large and small, that it will be impossible for opponents to keep up with it all, let alone fight it all. A lot of laws are going to be passed, a lot of regulations changed or abolished, and a lot of budgets rewritten in ways that will lead to the unnecessary deaths of a lot of people, and serious negative impacts for many of us. That’s the inescapable reality.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that these people are not omnipotent, they’re not a majority by any stretch, and they’re not invincible. They can be beaten back – in ways that initially prevent a lot of misery, and in the longer run swing the political pendulum back to something resembling sanity. And if we’re lucky and smart, more than that.

So what do we do?

Beyond Protest

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, massive protests, of the type we’ll see this weekend and (I suspect) a lot more in the future, can be useful. But they’re not sufficient. I want to start a conversation about what it will take to beat Trump – and by “Trump,” I’m just using The Donald as shorthand for the entire constellation of politics of ignorance and hatred that will still control our federal government even if Trump were to drop dead on Monday. Trump himself is both a problem and a symptom of a much larger and deeper problem.

It’s easy to print posters or generate memes that say “Resist Trump.” It’s much harder to translate that into actual policy victories. It’s not as though these are people who will see millions in the streets, shrug their shoulders because they know they’re illegitimate, and go home. The people now ascending to power are ruthless. They do not care about mandates, they will act to protect and expand their power in whatever ways they can and they will not care in the least what you think about them unless they are forced to.

How do we get from millions of pissed off people to policy victories in a political system where even the remaining trappings of popular democracy are being relentlessly stripped away by our opponents – because they know they’re illegitimate?

I would like to propose that any broad, heterogeneous movement to resist Trump should prioritize exploiting two major Trump weaknesses, and on building positive infrastructure – the better alternative – in three major ways.

The Opportunities

The first major weakness of the Trump phenomenon is that it’s not a monolith. “Divide and conquer” has been a political strategy for all of recorded human history for a reason: it works. And even though they’re all acting like they’re batshit crazy, many of the people in the Trump/Republican coalition have conflicting priorities and genuinely loathe each other. This is an opportunity.

What do billionaires like Trump and several of his Cabinet picks, Christian jihadists like Mike Pence and Ben Carson, white nationalists like Stephen Bannon, and ordinary suburban white grandparents who didn’t trust Hillary Clinton have in common? Almost nothing – except that all of them don’t have any use for people like you and me.

That’s not glib rhetoric; I phrased it very precisely. The only thing holding Trump’s coalition together is tribalism. Republicans have been building this frame for 30 years, convincing people to vote in many cases against their logical self-interest because they identify with the tribe, and the tribe is almost entirely defined by abstract notions of who it isn’t. They don’t resent you and me personally – just people like us. And people like them, fellow members of the tribe? They’re OK, pretty much by definition. That’s how tribal identity works. And for Republicans, over the last half-century it’s evolved from “my country right or wrong” to “my tribe right or wrong.”

They’re not at all the same thing any longer. For decades figures like Rush Limbaugh have cultivated audiences by demonizing women, blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, gays, Latinos, the disabled, the young, the old, pretty much everyone, because it’s all an abstraction: The Other. The scary, threatening, sinful Other. But Joe Bob, in Congress? He’s one of us.

Donald Trump is the logical extension of this intentional long-term Republican strategy. The first in his long litany of targets for insult and contempt was establishment Republicans, and, as with the Tea Party, they were targets precisely because they hadn’t followed through enough on their promises to punish people not in the tribe. So they were banished. Immigrants are still coming in, abortion is still legal (kind of), gays can even get married now. These are issues that establishment Republicans used for decades to fire up voters, but that they didn’t really care much about themselves – generally speaking, they were all about the plutocracy. And Trump’s genius was to hammer them as no longer being worthy members of the tribe.

There’s a reason Trump’s chief strategist is a white nationalist. Tactically as well as ideologically, white nationalism can go nowhere unless white people start to think of themselves as white (rather than, say, “normal.”) Promoting tribal identity is the entire white nationalist project. And it’s Trump’s project, too. Whittle away at the tribe, and he fails. That’s why someone with Bannon’s experience is so invaluable to Trump.

There are a multitude of potential fissures to exploit within this tribe, starting with the people in power. Oligarchs, bigots, generals, and soldiers in Christ have entirely different and often conflicting goals. To name some obvious examples: a lot of oligarchs like cheap immigrant labor; the bigots, not so much. ObamaCare must be repealed because it was that Kenyan dude’s idea, and he definitely wasn’t in the tribe. But throwing the country’s health care system into crisis is going to be really, really bad for business.

The Republican civil war was over before it started in terms of who has power; the radicals won, and every Republican office holder now faces an imperative to cater to The Tribe. But the fissures are still there to be widened. Skillful lobbying, messaging, and political pressuring can help.

Trump’s second major weakness is all but inevitable for authoritarians in general, and especially megalomaniacal narcissists like Trump: overreach. They have enormous power, but they always want more. They’re often fine with violating laws to get what they want, and they may or may not bother to change the laws first to legalize what they’re doing. (We’re already seeing this, for example, with the endless conflict of interest law violations by both Trump himself and many of his nominees.) Our judiciary is clearly in danger of losing its independence, but some checks and balances still do exist there.

As for popular resistance, the famous Gandhi quote -“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they crack down, then you win” – doesn’t just describe the particular tactics that he, and later Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela (among many others), used so effectively against enormously repressive opposition. It describes overreach. More recently, before the Occupy Movement died a slow, largely self-inflicted death, for a moment it held widespread public support. That came not just because Occupy targeted predatory banks (though that was an excellent target), but due to publicity from a series of widely publicized incidents of police abuse of protesters in places like New York, Davis (California), and Seattle. Overreach.

This doesn’t have to be a matter of police violence, either. Taking essential health care access away from millions of sick people is overreach, too. The effort in 2005 to privatize Medicare and Social Security was overreach then, and likely will be again. Ditto with mass immigration enforcement, criminalization of contraception, risking economic catastrophe by refusing to pay on the national debt, or any number of other voluntary crises these people are quite capable of launching. When they do – and they will – we need to be ready to take full political advantage.

What We Can Do

People are gonna do what they’re gonna do. Different people will express their fear, anger, disgust, and righteous solidarity in the era of Trump in countless different ways. But I’d like to suggest that beyond reactive protests, we’ll be best served strategically by taking the initiative in three major arenas.

Tell Our Stories

Tribal identity is a Trump strength, but it’s also a weakness – and without it, Trump is lost. Undoing more than a generation of demonizing and abstract caricatures is a long-term project, but there’s no better time to start than now. It’s perhaps the most important thing any of us can do, and everyone can do it.

The thing about the Trump tribe is that it’s largely abstract. For example, nationally Trump won a narrow majority of the votes of white women despite his widely documented (and frequently criminal) personal misogyny. Why? Trump demonizing his victims – defining them as Not In The Tribe (because, for example, she’s fat and ugly, not like you) was part of it. A much bigger part was that Trump positioned himself as being a central voice for The Tribe. Crooked Hillary clearly was not – and she never even seriously tried to be, which was tailor-made for someone like Trump.

But the personal stories of so many victims of Trump’s alleged, serial sexual assaults did more to damage him than any other single thing in a campaign that was full of revelations and incidents that would have doomed a more traditional candidate. Why? When his victims told their stories, they became real, recognizable people rather than caricatures. The women who were able and willing to imagine being in that situation after hearing such stories were the ones who were far more likely to turn away from their potential support for Trump

Now multiply that impact by the number of people in your own lives who could tell stories: of being unable to get health care or affordable housing, of having an elderly parent whose pension was stolen or whose Medicare became an unusable voucher; the neighbor who got deported or died from a botched illegal abortion; and on, and on, and on.

Tens of millions of people, minimum, will be seriously negatively impacted by what Republicans are lining up to do. The more that a Trump tribal member hears stories of people they personally know who are struggling or worse with such policies, the more humanized we abstract “Others” become, the more the whole tribal frame crumbles. We are everywhere, and you already know us. Chip away at the tribal identity. Because without the Tribe, the Trump coalition has nothing, literally nothing, to unite it. Divide and conquer, one story at a time.

Create Our Own Institutions

As a generalization, communities and nations create government institutions to collectively do the kinds of things that can’t easily be done individually or in small groups. That can mean anything from national defense to building highways to funding public schools to running the power grid.

When our elected representatives are all about taking away funding for some of the things we’ve taken for granted as collective responsibilities – whether it’s our social safety net, or access (however flawed) to health care, or enforcement of laws that keep our water and air clean, whatever it might be, we have three choices. We can go along with it, or we can elect new representatives that will reverse the actions, or we can create other institutions – preferably ones safe from Trumpian interference – to accomplish the lost tasks.

A lot of pressure is going to fall on state and local governments to do what the feds stop doing. Where possible, we need to work to ensure that they act accordingly, and work to ensure that they have the necessary resources. But whether it’s large-scale projects like public banks or community clinics, or essential social safety net work like food banks, housing co-ops and land trusts, or homelessness services, there are plenty of things individuals, nonprofits, and conscientious businesses can do to help. We’ll need activism – and money – on all of those fronts in the next few years. Get busy. While we work to change policies, there will also the immediate need to triage the coming damage.

More and Better Democrats

And then there’s that bit about elected representation.

The surge of activism in 2005-06, around the Iraq War, the New Orleans diaspora, and a host of other Bush administration failures, used the phrase “more and better Democrats” to describe the need to take power back from the Bush cabal in DC. For a time, it worked – until Obama won and people (mistakenly) got complacent. But it’s still the bottom line.

They don’t have to be Democrats, of course. If the Greens or some socialist party or FSM-loving group can position itself to gain power at Republican expense, awesome. But right now, the Democratic Party is the best vehicle for combating the Trump coalition in DC. That’s why Bernie Sanders, lifelong independent socialist, ran for that party’s presidential nomination. The party is just a vehicle. The Democratic vehicle can be effective, but it needs much better drivers. Long-term? The future is unwritten.

Short-term, however, we’re stuck with the Dems, and any party establishment that can unite behind a fatally flawed candidate like Hillary Clinton, simply put, needs to go, from DC to the state and local level. Clinton’s campaign in 2008, when she started as an overwhelming favorite and wound up losing the nomination to some black dude with a funny name, should have warned away any sentient politico. HRC has a lot of skills, but she doesn’t inspire people. Nobody outside, maybe, Lower Manhattan wants to be in her tribe. Even the one enthusiastic base she did have in 2008, older feminists, largely disappeared in 2016.

Clinton was uniquely poorly suited to competing with the sort of tribal politics Trump represents. Obama, in 2008, inspired people. In 2016, Sanders inspired people. Politics has changed, media has changed, and how we get our information has changed since the Clintons left Arkansas for the big city in 1992. Business as usual will no longer cut it, dry policy recommendations will no longer cut it, and at every level Democrats who don’t understand this emotional imperative need to move or be moved out of the way. Evolve or die.

This is already happening. At the grass roots, across the country, people energized by the Sanders campaign are starting to run for office themselves. New leaders like Pramila Jayapal – who rose to prominence by telling the stories of demonized “Others” and by being fierce advocates for them – will be far more effective in resisting Trump than the sorts of sclerotic party hacks who may do great work behind the scenes, but are no longer appropriate to lead the party even if it’s “their turn.”

One of the great benefits of getting involved in local politics is that at the state and especially county and city level, some of the battles are winnable – and given the massive changes coming down the political food chain from DC in everything from health care to education to housing to labor and environmental protection, there will be massive battles over how to prioritize resources among multiple pressing needs; how to raise more resources; and how to create the kinds of community institutions that can help when the programs we’ve come to take for granted fall victim to hatred, ignorance, or short-sighted greed. At the end of the day, community is our best security. We take care of each other. Tribes built on love, and mutual help, are more powerful and lasting than the ones built on hatred and fear.

Love doesn’t always win. Our opponents, generally speaking, could not care less about moral witness. They understand and respect power, and little else. But power comes in many forms, and a movement that is both humane and sympathetic, and at the same time unapologetically fierce and willing to take risks – that’s a very powerful movement.

Love’s failures notwithstanding, politicians sell hope for a reason. People want love to win. They want a better future for the people they care about. If we model that, and tell our stories, and elect as our decision-making representatives people who understand the need to fight fiercely for what we all need, our odds get a lot better. We won’t win every battle, but we won’t lose them all, either, and over time we’ll win more, and then more. And even dictatorships crumble when it becomes clear that they’ve lost legitimacy. Speaking truth to power isn’t just about feeling good about our own moral clarity.

Tell your stories, and get organized.

For several days now, nationally and locally, progressives have been whipping themselves into a frenzied outrage over a vote last week on an amendment in the US Senate, co-sponsored by Amy Klobuchar and (BE STILL MY THROBBING HEART!!) Bernie Sanders. Their amendment, the narrative goes, would have allowed Americans to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada.

The amendment failed by a relatively narrow margin, and several Democrats voted against it. Nationally, rising corporate Democratic star Cory Booker (D-NJ) has gotten the most heat for his “no” vote, but it so happens that both of Washington State’s senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, also voted against the measure. And these votes are being taken, usually with a good deal of online spittle, as obvious evidence that the “corporate Democrats who killed this bill” are Big Pharma sellouts in particular and. more generally, Part of the Problem that is leaving us with President Trump this week. Literally millions of words have been said or written to this effect over the past five days.

There’s only two tiny, itsy-bitsy problems with using this vote to flagellate Booker et al:

1) That’s not what happened.

2) That’s not why it happened.

If it makes you feel better, Booker is and always has been a tool of Wall Street with a feel-good biography. Cantwell has been a technocratic centrist since she was in the House of Representatives 25 years ago, a policy wonk who gets good nerdy regulatory work done but was a DLC member before it was cool the first time. Patty Murray’s votes are a little more liberal, but in a quarter-century in the Senate she’s almost never sponsored anything controversial (quick, name me a senator, any senator, who says they hate military veterans). She rapidly rose to power in her party by raising a ton of corporate money for herself and especially her colleagues and party.

Needless to say, they all loved Hillary Clinton. And absolutely, their disconnection from Sanders’ priorities and (especially) the concerns of ordinary people are prime examples of the kind of timid-to-useless deadwood now clogging the highest levels of the Democratic Party. You want to blame corporate Democrats for giving us Donald Trump? These three are as good as any to blame.

But last week’s vote has nothing, zip, nada to do with any of that. And none of the outrage pouring out of people in the last week contains any acknowledgement, let alone understanding, of Senate procedure and what the vote was about – let alone why senators voted as they did. In parading their ignorance, progressives come off as just as ill-informed and conspiratorial as any low-information Trump fanboy. We’re better that that. So bear with me for some tedious procedural explaining.

What Actually Happened

Sanders’ amendment was not to an ordinary bill. It was an amendment to this year’s Senate budget reconciliation bill, a part of the budget process that does not get signed by the President and that does not become law. Instead, it is a framework for use by Senate committee chairs as they prepare and then hold hearings on the budget.

Sanders’ amendment would not have legalized importation of prescription drugs from Canada, or anything else. It would merely have authorized the Senate Budget Committee’s chairman, Tea Party Republican Mike Enzi of Wyoming, to propose such a measure should he choose to do so.

Enzi, however, didn’t want that authority – he said so publicly, and he also voted against the Sanders amendment. Even if the amendment had passed, it would have accomplished nothing, because a troglodyte like Enzi isn’t interested, and Wyoming voters aren’t about to throw him out over it. This was a meaningless vote, one of a batch of amendments offered by Democrats with no expectation at all that any of them would pass.

Why It Happened

That batch of amendments was all meaningless in terms of influencing the actual budget, let alone becoming law. Everyone involved understood that the Republican majority would make sure that the amendments would all fail.

But they did have a purpose, and it’s the same sort of game Republicans play when it’s the Democrats controlling a house of Congress: to get the opposing party’s legislators to take a vote that can be used in campaign ads against them when they run for re-election. In this case, “Bob Smith – VOTED AGAINST CHEAPER PRICES FOR YOUR PRESCRIPTION DRUGS!!!,” and on to the next three second hit. However, invariably, when you introduce such amendments, some of your own people will find it more politically useful to vote against it, too. So if you’re from a state with a lot of Big Pharma jobs, like, say, New Jersey, and your state is just as likely to elect a Republican as a Democrat, you don’t want your opponent’s campaign blurb to be, “Bob Smith – VOTED TO TAKE AWAY YOUR JOBS!!!”

(That explains Booker’s vote – he actually gets a lot less in Pharma donations than your new Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, or a number of other Democratic senators, including some who voted “yes.” Why Murray and Cantwell voted “no” is anyone’s guess, and really does not matter.)

Conversely, Republicans know what this game is about, too. So they can afford to have a few of their members vote “yes,” knowing that it won’t pass. You coordinate which of your members would benefit most from avoiding this particular headache. Thus, John McCain voted “yes” because he’s going to have a hard time getting re-elected. Ted Cruz doesn’t exactly hate Big Pharma, but Texas is the state with by far the highest number of uninsured residents, so why hand ammunition to his next opponent? So he, too, voted “yes.” And so on.

This is not s new game. A decade ago, when new Congressman Dave Reichert was barely surviving re-election in his then-swing district on the Eastside, he got huge benefits from the perception that he was an independent moderate – a perception helped greatly, as he revealed on video to a friendly suburban audience, because his party leadership would tell him when it was safe to break ranks on meaningless votes like this one. If a vote was going to be close, Reichert would vote the party line.

With the Klobuchar/Sanders amendment everyone’s all worked up about this week, that’s what would have happened, too. It’s all political kabuki, tedious and predictable, staged solely to cater to or avoid the wrath of the rubes. Except that it turns out that, on this of all weeks, what the left-leaning rubes want is the blood of their own ostensible allies. If this sounds like an exact mirror of why even rational Republicans no longer dare play rational ones on TV, that’s because it is. IT’S ALL OPTICS.

With all of the truly destructive votes cast by Democrats like Booker and Murray in any given year, it makes less than no sense to go after them on this one – a vote with no impact, not even any force of law, even if it had passed, which there was never a chance of happening. The nicest thing that can be said is that the lunatic far right’s tactics worked, and they now have absolute control of the federal government. And it’s true that as Trump’s Cabinet Nominees From Hell sail through their Senate confirmation hearings, Democrats playing tiny business-as-usual games like these – rather than, say, trying to save the Republic from outright fascism – is remarkably tone deaf.

But the far right isn’t in complete control of the federal government now because they’ve embraced hatred and ignorance as core values. That’s not a tactic we need to embrace. Progressives can hold our elected allies (and pseudo-allies) accountable without going down that road. Right?

”The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would have turned 88 yesterday. He has been dead for far longer than he was alive. As his living memory fades, replaced by a feel-good “I have a dream” whitewash that ignores much of what he stood for and fought against, it’s more important than ever to recapture the true history of Dr. King – because as we enter the era of President Trump, much of what he fought against is resurfacing or still with us today.

Even before Dr. King’s assassination, in the mid-’60s virtually every major city in the US saw riots. Those riots were centered in its black ghettos and frequently fueled by systemic police violence against its residents.

Only five years after King’s death, in 1973, a young Donald Trump represented his father’s real estate company, Trump Management, against a sweeping Department of Justice lawsuit alleging that the Trumps systematically discriminated against blacks in renting their New York City apartments.

Another 13 years later, in 1986, an Alabama attorney named Jefferson Beauregard Sessions became only the second nominee since World War Two to have his nomination for the federal judiciary rejected – explicitly because of Sessions’ overt racism.

Now, in 2017, an unrepentant Sessions is about to become the head of the Department of Justice, charged with – among other things – housing discrimination complaints, suppression of black voting (now done wirh computer-aided precision unthinkable when King fought Jim Crow), and investigations of local police brutality against non-whites in cities across the US.

Sessions has been picked for that post by the same Donald Trump who inherited a local real estate empire built on discrimination, and who won the presidency in large part with unusually explicit appeals to racism.

Just how long does that arc need to be before justice takes hold?

King’s faith-based optimism in the moral goodness of humanity may, after a half-century that has seen tremendous progress as well as widespread regression, seem quaint and naive at best, irrelevant at worst. But his moral vision is not the only reason he is remembered today, and it’s not the only lesson the history of his spectacular, all-too-brief career offers as we confront Trump’s America.

The Forgotten History

King, the man, was, along with Mohandas Gandhi, one of the two most internationally revered symbols of nonviolence in the 20th century. He spent his life defying authority and convention, citing a higher moral authority, and gave hope and inspiration for the liberation of people of color on six continents. King is not a legend because he believed in diversity trainings and civic ceremonies, or because he had a nice dream. He is remembered because he took serious risks to his own life (and eventually lost it) fighting for a higher cause.

King is also remembered because, among a number of brave and committed civil rights leaders and activists, he had a flair for self-promotion, a style that also appealed to white liberals, and the extraordinary social strength of the black Southern churches behind him. And because he died before he had a chance to be widely believed a relic or buffoon.

Most importantly, King was a brilliant political tactician. He became the leader of tens of millions of Americans widely thought to have no power, and showed how they could, along with white allies, exercise power – effectively enough to win. He exploited divisions in his racist white opponents, pitting the die-hard segregationists against white-owned businesses crippled by economic boycotts. He gained allies in long-time segregationists like Lyndon Johnson, who was responding to King’s power politics, not his moral appeals. That’s a part of King’s legacy that’s squarely relevant today for marginalized communities of all types.

What little history TV will give us around King’s holiday this year is at least as much about forgetting as about remembering, as much about self-congratulatory patriotism that King was American as self-examination that American racism made him necessary and that government, at every level, sought to destroy him. We hear “I have a dream”; we don’t hear his powerful indictments of poverty, the Vietnam War, and the military-industrial complex. We see Bull Connor in Birmingham; we don’t see arrests for fighting segregated housing in Chicago, or the years of beatings and busts before he won the Nobel Peace Prize. We don’t hear about the mainstream American contempt at the time for King, even after that Peace Prize, nor the FBI harassment or his reputation among conservatives as a Commie dupe.

Pop culture’s MLK has no politics, no history, and even no faith. We don’t see retrospectives on King’s linkage of civil rights with Third World liberation. We forget that he died in Memphis lending support for a union (the garbage workers’ strike), while organizing a multi-racial Poor Peoples’ Campaign that demanded affordable housing and decent-paying jobs as basic civil rights transcending skin color. We forget that many of King’s fellow leaders weren’t nearly so polite. Cities were burning. Selma got the movie, but Watts, Newark, and Detroit made a difference, too.

We Could Each Be Dr. King

Sixty-two years after the Montgomery bus boycott catapulted a 26-year-old King into prominence, blacks are being newly systematically disenfranchised in our elections. Affirmative action and school desegregation are dead. Urban school districts across the country are as segregated and unequal as ever. A conservative US Supreme Court has helped usher in a new era when possible redress for discrimination has been steadily whittled away.

Gifted African-Americans like Barack Obama can achieve at a level unthinkable in King’s day. But the better test of a society’s marginalization of discriminated-against groups is not how the most talented people of each group fares, but how the mediocre do. A black mediocrity like George W. Bush could still never, ever become President of the United States. A wealthy black con artist like Donald Trump would be doing hard time.

Resisting Trump requires that we first acknowledge that the overt racism of Montgomery in 1955 is still a central feature of America in 2017. It shows up in our geography, in our jails, in our schools, in our voting booths, in our shelters and food banks, in our economy, in our law enforcement (hello, SPD), and in the very earnest and extremely white activist groups that often carry the banner on these issues.

King used the moral outrage of white Americans to force change; in a new, far more cynical century, we don’t go much for moral outrage any longer. It’d take a whole lot more than Bull Connor’s police dogs to make the news today.

But in 2017, we also have strengths not available to Dr. King. The forces of racism and hate notwithstanding, ours is now a far more multi-cultural society. Far more people have personal relationships with people of other races, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, or classes. Appeals to abstract moral principles mean something, but injuries to people we know personally mean more. And a new generation raised on social media and networking is not only interconnected in ways unthinkable in King’s time, but is able to organize and to resist injustice at a scale he could never have imagined.

The saddest loss in the modern narrative of Dr. King’s career is the story of who he was: a man without wealth, without elected office, who managed as a single individual to change the world simply through the strength of his moral convictions. His power came from his willingness to act at enormous personal risk to do what he knew to be right. That story could inspire many millions to similar action — if only it were told. We could each be Dr. King.

MLK has become an icon, not a historical figure (distorted or otherwise). History requires context; icons don’t. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., nonviolent martyr to reconciliation and justice, has become a schlocky greeting card, a warm, fuzzy, feel-good invocation of neighborliness, a literally whitewashed file photo for sneakers or soda commercials, a reprieve for post-holiday shoppers, an excuse for a three-day weekend, a cardboard cutout used for photo ops by dissembling politicians of all colors.

His image is misused in these ways precisely because he was powerful. The movement he led and inspired gained power not just because its cause was just, but also because of the risk-taking, courage, and determination of both King and millions of other less well-known people.

How they demanded change, and won it though the exercise of power nobody thought they had, should inspire all of us. Now more than ever, their story needs to be told. As it inspires us to action, that arc might just start bending back toward justice again.

As promised, here’s an updated calendar of local protests and resistance surrounding the inauguration of Donald Trump and his bands of zealots, nihilists, incompetents, and Russian plants. Starting tonight, for the next ten days Seattle will be very, very busy with protests and organizing to resist Trump’s America and begin to build something better. Be part of it.

Almost all of these events have Facebook event pages of their own. Find them, share them with your friends, and let the organizers know you’re coming!

And then after this wave of protests subsides, keep working, to help create the alternative policies and groups we’ll desperately need to mitigate what will be a crisis on too many fronts to recite. Everyone will be affected by the takeover of the federal government by radical nihilists, con artists, and moral scolds. Everyone. This IS a local issue.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 12, 5 PM reception, 5:30 PM doors open, 7 PM program starts: City of Seattle’s annual MLK “Unity Day” with keynote speaker Angela Davis. Free, but head down there now – this will sell out. Town Hall, 8th & Seneca, downtown.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 13, 6-8 PM: El Comite and others are organizing a forum for undocumented and other immigrants from around the state to tell their stories and to organize. St. Mary’s Church, 611 20th Ave. S., Judkins Park.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 14, 12-2 PM: “Resist Trump: Town Hall Action Meeting”, a meeting for organizing strategies and trainings, hosted by the “Seattle Resist Trump Coalition” (which includes the organizers of all of these other events – there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes coordination happening.) Bertha Knight Landes Room, Seattle City Hall, 5th & James.

1-3:30 PM: “J20 Banner-Making Party,” sponsored by Ungovernable2017.com. At Agnes Underground, 1433 12th Ave. Ste. A1 on Capitol Hill.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 15, noon: Sen. Bernie Sanders (by video feed) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal headline a rally to oppose ACA repeal, massive Medicaid cuts, and the federal defunding of Planned Parenthood. Westlake Park, 4h & Pine.

MoveOn.org and others are organizing Community Meetings to Resist Trump. There are several in King County, including three in the city of Seattle: 1 PM at the Green Lake Library, 7364 E. Green Lake Way N.; 1 PM at the Rainier Beach Library, 9125 Rainier Ave. S.; and 2 PM at the Redwing Cafe in Rainier Beach, 9272 57th Ave. S. Check MoveOn.org for additional listings in our area.

MONDAY, JANUARY 16, 9:30 AM-4:30 PM: “Stop the Hate: Come Together” is the theme of the 35th annual MLK Day Celebration at Garfield High School, 23rd Ave. & Jefferson St. in the Central District. You can bet this year’s “celebration” will be all about building a more loving and inclusive alternative to Trump’s America. 9:30-10:50, workshops; 11 AM, gymnasium rally; 12:30, march to Federal Building, 2nd Ave. & Madison St., where there will be another rally; 1-4:30, Career Fair at Garfield.

7 PM: “Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Revolution,” talk sponsored by the Uhuru Solidarity Movement – Seattle. The Station, 2533 16th Ave. S. on Beacon Hill.

FRIDAY. JANUARY 20 will bring the biggest inauguration protests in US history in Washington, DC…and in Seattle.

8 AM: KEXP Radio is hosting a “Bed-In To Give Peace a Chance,” featuring a number of live bands. Representatives of Planned Parenthood, The Vera Project, ACLU of Washington, TeenTix, Gender Justice League, and Office of Arts and Culture will be on site with more information about their respective organizations. The Gathering Space at KEXP’s studios, 472 1st Ave. N., in the NW corner of Seattle Center, on the corner of 1st Ave. & Republican just north of Key Arena.

ALL MORNING: Student walkouts around the city; students will convene at noon at Seattle Central Community College (aka Seattle College), Broadway & Pine.

1 PM: El Comite is organizing an immigrants’ rights march – doubtless joined by lots of students and other sympathizers – starting with a 1 PM rally at Judkins Park, 22nd Ave. just south of Jackson, and then marching downtown to the Federal Building, 2nd Ave. & Madison St., to join the 4 PM Seattle Resist Trump Coalition rally, which will then march to Westlake Park, 4th Ave. & Pine St., for yet more 5 PM speaking and agitating and whatnot into the evening.

Also on Inauguration Day, Breitbart News editor and notorious racist and bigot Milo Yiannopoulos is speaking at 7 PM at the University of Washington. Rather than give Yiannopoulos the kinds of confrontations he craves, campus organizers are hosting a counter-event, Stand Up Against Hate, from 6-11 PM with speakers and bands at Red Square on the University of Washington campus.

Protesting isn’t your thing? From 12-8 PM, the City of Seattle and Seattle United for Immigrant and Refugee Families are offering FREE help on a wide variety of immigration issues, from applying for visas or citizenship to legal counseling to personal safety and much more. At McCaw Hall, 319 Mercer St. on the north side of Seattle Center.

There’s also a bunch of cool bands and shows doing stuff that night to fortify us for the next four years, too. Including, just up the street from McCaw Hall:

Salon de la Resistance: An Anti-Inaugural Ball, 8 PM-1 AM at The Ruins Seattle, 570 N. Roy St. (just north of Seattle Center). Featuring DJ Gene Balk (Emerald City Soul Club), Trickbag’s Mr. B, and many surprise guests. 21 plus, no host bar. Tickets $35. All bar and poster shop proceeds, and a portion of ticket sales, will be donated to the ACLU and El Centro de la Raza.

Also on Inauguration Day, a social media blackout is being called for on the day of Trump’s inauguration. People are being asked to only post images of pure black all day on January 20, 2017, to protest the Trump presidency and to demand that more is done to combat fake news stories on social media. Find out more at http://www.socialmediablackout.net/. There is also a somewhat conflicting effort on the same day for everyone to post as their profile picture a photo of “The Best First Family Ever,” as a way of saying thanks to the outgoing Obamas.

Not enough marching for you? Good, because the largest of all of these events is likely to be…

SATURDAY, JANUARY 21, 10 AM-4 PM: Women’s March on Seattle (in conjunction with a similar, much larger march in DC) has, after long and tedious negotiations with the city, announced a march. It will convene in Judkins Park (which also hosts the Friday immigrants’ rally and march). 10 AM rally begins, 11 AM march begins. The route goes through downtown Seattle and ends with another rally at Seattle Center. As of today, Thursday 1/12, the event Facebook page lists 33,000 people as “going” and another 42,000 as “interested.” It’ll be yuugggee.

And now that people have marched in enormous numbers to support women’s issues, it’s time to fund part of the resistance:

SUNDAY, JANUARY 22, 9 AM: Pantsuit 5k run/walk around Green Lake. Registration $20, all proceeds benefit Planned Parenthood.