Stand Up!

 Things that are missing from our society is compassion, courtesy, and respect for our neighbors, colleagues, and fellow citizens. It has been replaced by hate, anger, vitriol, racism, sexism, and misogyny.  The hate & anger is continuously fueled by billionaires and politicians with an agenda. Their agenda is to make as much money as possible and pay as little tax as possible at the expense of the poor, working and middle classes using various forms of media (Fox News and X) to achieve their goals. 

 

 The Billionaire class, lead by Elon Musk and President Trump, who are representing the “top one percent” of the wealthiest people in the world, have convinced their supporters that they have their “best interests” at heart while their plans will hurt them the most. Last week, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez let the secret out of the bag during her Instagram live video. President Trump gave the top one precent a huge tax break in 2017 that sunsets this year. That tax break led to massive increases to the national debt, the most in any administration. 

 

A new tax cut to the wealthy will cost $4 Trillion to cover their tax break and the Trump Administration needs to find the money to cover it. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and other members of the one percent club are members in part because they have huge defense contracts with the federal government, hence neither Trump nor Musk are going to look at cutting the defense budget, so they need to gut programs that will hurt the poor, middle and working class and they don’t mind doing it.  

 

This is where Trump, Musk, et. al. use America’s history of racism and white anger to achieve their goals. Trump - Musk need to spread their racism, sexism, homophobia, & misogyny through pipelines of Fox News, Breitbart, and X to create a distraction from their plans. They have their base so convinced about an invasion of brown people at the border who are coming for their jobs, women, and houses that you would think Trump and Musk were plantation owners from Georgia in 1859. Meanwhile, Trump & Musk along with their MAGA majority in both houses of Congress are cutting vital programs such as Medicaid, Health and Human Services, and Education, which many Americans rely on including Trump supporters!

 

Trump increases his power at the expense of our marginalized and most vulnerable citizens who have very little means to defend themselves or fight back. He has taken away protections for the LBGTQ+ and non-white immigrants, some who had previously been protected from deportation under the Biden – Harris Administration. Trump’s executive orders have taken away congressionally approved funds for Healthy Start, Cancer Research, providing health services to the LBGTQ+ community, services and protections for the disabled, women, and other minorities under Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. Not only are Trump’s policies based on hate, but they are meant to take away freedoms that are guaranteed to all Americans in the Constitution. 

 

Four weeks into Trump’s second term, we are facing by far the biggest internal crisis that America has seen since the Civil War. Despite his denials during the campaign, President Trump has based his entire administration’s philosophy and policies on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. The goal of Project 2025 is to move all the wealth and political power to White Conservative Christians and cement that power by controlling all three branches of the Federal Government. Project 2025 calls for eliminating the traditional checks and balances in the Federal Government by gutting federal agencies of civil service workers, firing all the Inspector Generals in these agencies and replacing everyone with political appointees who take an oath to President Trump instead of the Constitution. 

 

President Trump rode Project 2025 to the White House based on a faux white grievance and through outlets such as Fox News, Elon Musk’s X, and right-wing pod casts, Trump is a master at gas lighting this faux grievance. Trump told this group that minorities, women, and LBGTQ+ communities are not only taking over America (funded by Jews) but they are taking away your way of life & the way of life that your forefathers had before you, and you need to fight back and only Trump can be your retribution and savior. This is right out of the fascist playbook, and it is the diversion that Trump needs to initiate his policies of gutting services that his own supporters rely on. 

 

Donald Trump, Elon Musk, The Heritage Foundation, and the MAGA wing of the Federal Government’s goal is to take away freedoms guaranteed to all of us. In 1941, FDR said that people (in countries occupied by the Nazis) had the right to four fundamental freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom of want, freedom of fear. FDR would never have envisioned that these freedoms are being taken away from Americans by a fascist American President whose inspiration is Hitler himself. But as FDR said in his first inaugural address almost 100 years ago, “All we have to fear, is fear itself!” 

 

The only way the Trump/Musk coalition gets its oxygen is from fear through hate. Adopting what FDR was saying to the current situation our country is facing is that we cannot let the fear, hate, and bullying by Trump paralyze us but instead we need to have the courage to stand up to the fear, hate, and bullying with confidence and courage. We need to stand up for ourselves and for those who cannot. We need to stand up for our children’s future, stand up for our parent’s welfare, stand up for our neighbors, stand up for our teachers, who sacrifice and educate our youth. We need to stand up for our policemen and firemen, who protect our homes and businesses, and we need to stand up because we know it’s the right thing to do!