Trump posts a video. In it, Trump and Vance are band members for The Grim Reaper. And the Reaper is, well—wait for it—Russell Voight, the author of Project 2025. Th brain behind the brawn. Talk about telling it like it is. Transparency on steroids. Okay, perhaps for even greater verisimilitude it should have been Voight and Thiel as a two-headed Reaper leading the band, but perhaps the sequel will get that right. 

Trump tells the military and all of us that dangers at home are the real dangers we face. He proclaims the enemy is in LA. Vance parrots the enemy is in Chicago. Soon Portland, San Francisco, and New York. And what do you know? They actually make an (unintended) point. Trump and his ilk are the real immediate enemy. And they are indeed within our country. They are who they warn us about. We have seen the enemy and it is Trump and Co. They even explicitly tell us so, or show us so. Grim Reaper indeed. 

A mob of Ice Agents attacksan apartment building in Chicago. They pull out sleeping kids and their parents. They Zip tie the kids. They handcuff the parents. They drag them out, throw them into the back of vans, and drive off. Where to?

That is the “enemy within” at work. Trump’s video—AI created, fascistically-prompted—is not entertainment.  Nor is it fiction. The “enemy within” announces itself. Are we listening?

We can spell out the details. We can describe how they decimate already inadequate programs. We can catalog how they violate already moribund laws. We can dissect the threats, tariffs, and bombings. We can count the children violated, list the stomachs made more hungry. And we must do all that because so far not everyone gets it. Some of us, indeed quite a few of us, still think Reaper’s band is just too unreal to be real. Stop exaggerating the danger, they say. Quit calling it fascism they instruct. Others think the features of the Reaper’s band are real and even frightening but add that they will in the end nonetheless save our society rather than incinerate our souls. Stop naysaying. Get on board the makeover train, they say. We do need a makeover. Some excesses are inevitable. Yes, there will be pain. But see the light. What’s wrong with that report, they ask. It is that this makeover is Reaper led. This makeover leads to death.

To report the facts and their implications therefore matters a lot. The details matter a lot. To grow consciousness, consciousness raising matters a lot. Especially when we write and speak the facts and their implications in ways that speak directly to those who don’t yet agree.

But I hope you will pardon me if I point out that the image of this vile orange entity sitting up in his bed, or perhaps slouching at a desk in his room, laughing up a storm in the middle of the night as he malignantly posts a video of demons killing us ought to be more than enough to propel ten million people into the street on October 18, the next No Kings day, to both raise new consciousness and simultaneously build toward retiring the Reaper. 

Macabre is not another word for cute. Homicidal is not a path toward peace. Suicidal is not a path toward justice. That Trump’s macabre, homicidal, suicidal postings don’t surprise us doesn’t mean they are laughably moot. They are sickeningly serious. To ridicule the maniac and then return to our daily agendas thinking he/they can’t last was never enough. Now it is less than zero.

October 18th is just two weeks away. 2,233 protests are planned. How many of us will attend? Trump sends masked agents to terrorize immigrant families. He profiles, arrests, detains, and disappears people. He prepares to send troops to occupy Democratic cities. Was his big meeting of Generals just for show? Just to scare? Or was it to also probe to find who will obey and who should be replaced? Trump requires subservience. He scapegoats immigrants and trans people. He elevates oil and savages solar. He further enriches the rich and impoverishes the poor. So for the next two weeks do we build No Kings on October 18? How can we not?

But then comes the big question. How many of us will go to our schools or workplaces or even to our dinner tables now, this week and next, to urge others into motion? How many of us will organize as best we can, writing, speaking, urging, during each new day for the 18th? And then an even bigger question arises. How many of us will, on October 19th, sign on to do that much and still more for November 19th? Or even sooner?

Yes there is reason to fear what is unfolding. But to exaggerate their power and silence ourselves—to succumb to fear does Trump’s work for him. If you seek a way to personally help resistance grow, diversify, and even extend beyond when Trump disappears check out AllofUS.org it offer a connection mechanism anyone, anywhere, can use.

But what should resistance seek? Pre-Trumpian business as usual gave us Trump. Observing that that is undeniably true doesn’t mean we have to return to pre-Trumpian business as usual. It doesn’t mean we have to settle for that only to later arrive back where we now are, or worse—much less to do so again and again. It means, instead, that even as we grow our resistance sufficiently to end Trump, end Vance, end Voight, and end Theil, we need to also imbue our resistance with sufficient spirit, solidarity, desire, organization, and awareness for it to continue non-stop way past eliminating our current “danger within.” We need to prepare means and mindsets to continue for as long as it takes to fundamentally alter society’s defining relations. We need to make another world that is possible our world. To break the chain of endless oppressive return. Not overnight, but ceaselessly.

No Kings, now. A better world to follow.

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