The white supremacist Bannon threw down the gauntlet the other day to the “opposition party,” which—if he recalls correctly—won the popular vote by a whopping 3 million, making Trump in many respects an illegitimate President.
Bannon, who just last Fall declared his publication, Breitbart, “the platform for the alt.right” with its anti-Semites, homophobes, racists and conspiracy theorists, had trouble separating “the media”—by which he means media critical of his leader, not toadies like Fox “News”—from those of us who are opposed to the current regime. “It’s going to be a fight,” he promised, with regard to his regime’s relations with us. “It’s going to get worse,” as if it could, after this shockingly incompetent rollout. Then he declared, with Hitlerian fury, “If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken.”
I could almost picture him spewing saliva and slamming his fist into the table.
Speaking for The Resistance, I’m honored to accept Bannon’s challenge. We did not ask for this war, but we gladly, proudly, accept it. We fight for our country: its traditional values of openness, honesty, fairness, decency, truth. We fight for the slogan on the Statue of Liberty, we fight for the oppressed and downtrodden who often cannot fight for themselves. We fight for women and their right to control their own bodies. We fight for the LGBTQ community and the right of transgender youth to use whatever public bathroom they want. We fight for Mexican immigrants and the humane treatment of their families, even if they’re undocumented. We fight for the environment: our air, our waters, our forests and prairies, and for the critters who lived on this land before we did. We fight for truth—that species that has been put on the endangered list by this pathologically mendacious President. We fight for the First Amendment to the Constitution: “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
“We fight against this President’s evident tendency—so common among chicken hawk Republican white men—to instigate overseas wars that will butcher more American kids.”
We fight against the racism Trump revealed during his years of lying about President Obama’s birthplace. We fight against his smearing of Muslims, in a thinly-disguised attempt to rally the most xenophobic white elements of our society. We fight against his embrace of a theocratic, anti-democratic religious sect, militant Christianity, and all the dangers it poses. We fight for scientific inquiry, and against ignorance and superstition. We fight against this regime cutting taxes on the richest among us, including the billionaires he promised to “drain the swamp” of, but who now run his Cabinet. We fight against the “deconstruction” of our foreign policy and the needless antagonism Trump has engendered among friends like Mexico, Canada, Sweden, Great Britain, France and Australia–who’s next? We fight against the secret ties, bordering on treason, between Trump and Putin. We fight against this President’s evident tendency—so common among chicken hawk Republican white men—to instigate overseas wars that will butcher more American kids. We fight against his absurd wall, which will further drain the Treasury of tens of billions of dollars and will accomplish precisely nothing, except to insult Mexicans.
We can work with this President in certain areas, particularly the infrastructure. Repairing our roads, bridges, tunnels, sewer systems, subways and dams is a very Democratic thing to do, which is why we are skeptical at this point that the tea party Congress will vote to fund such a big program. Should such a bill be proposed, Trump can count on the support of Democrats. But I’m not holding my breath that Trump will follow through.
Meanwhile, Steve Bannon, challenge accepted! Bring it on! You rally your folks and we’ll rally ours. We’re ready to roll. Your Congressmen are encountering us wherever they go, in town halls, in the streets, in the hallways of the Capitol, through email. You, Bannon, and your basket of deplorables, and above all your President—not mine—have done something Democrats were unable to do this last cycle: unite us. And, as the old civil rights saying goes, The People United Will Never Be Defeated!
