I'm in the process of gathering more information for the next post in my series on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy, so today's post will not be a continued exposition of Chapter 5. I do, however, want to make a few more comments on the attempted takeover of the U.S. Congress by pro-Trump thugs this past week.
First, we now know that the mob that assaulted the Capitol had been preparing its action for weeks. We also know that the mob had been preparing to abduct members of Congress at gunpoint and bind them with zip ties and rope. We know that most of the organizing and coordinating between the various thugs who assaulted the Capitol had taken place online, in full view of the FBI and the Capitol police. We now also know for a fact that white American evangelicals and their pastors comprised a large part of the mob. We also know that similar mobs stormed a California county house and surrounded a number of state houses last week. We know that several Republican lawmakers (such as this man) joined in the call to commit violence. We now know that pro-Trump fascists and other persons associated with the Far Right have infiltrated many police departments across the United States. (See this, this, and this for instance.) We know that some of these officers traveled to Washington DC last week to join the riot.
And we know that those who orchestrated last week's trouble are making plans - in plain sight - to do it again.
So how to respond to all of this? If you're like me, your first reaction is likely to feel a great and terrible anger - an indignation which has an element of righteousness to it, yet which leads to rash errors if not properly guided and handled. That anger can lead to moralizing, which is both an innocuous response and a rather useless one. The people who orchestrated last week's events have no morals, no better angels that anyone can appeal to. They will be deaf to your sermons. So that leads to the second of several possible reactions: the urge to go to the streets and organize counter-demonstrations against the fascists! But there is a problem with this approach, namely, that the fascists, like a pack of rabid dogs, are keen to provoke violence. If they succeed by their violence in provoking you to counter-violence, you become part of the problem. (Unfortunately, this has already started to happen. Remember what I wrote a while back about relying on mass protest rallies?)
So let's consider the third response: to construct a strategy for nonviolently shifting the balance of power away from those who want to dominate the rest of us. Consider the following perspective from Part 1 of Gene Sharp's The Politics of Nonviolent Action: that the source of armed conflict between various groups of people is the belief that political power is like a solid, durable stone that can be possessed only by the strongest and most violent members of society. This belief is false, however. And the power of an oppressor can be disintegrated by a people who build their own social power and withdraw their consent from the oppressor.
This is good news. I consider myself a fundamentalist Christian, which means that unlike the vast majority of white American evangelicals, I believe I'm supposed to obey the Sermon on the Mount and not physically threaten my fellow human beings. (This is why I don't own a gun.) However, I know that there are tens of millions of white American evangelicals who stand ready "in the name of Jesus" to harm, oppress, and even kill their fellow human beings. Yet they comprise a continually shrinking minority of the population. This means that their power is declining. This is especially true when one considers that the power they claim does not consist of knowing how to do useful things that benefit their fellow human beings. Rather, it consists almost entirely in the assault rifles that many of them openly carry everywhere like pacifiers or security blankets, without which they would feel like ghosts upon the earth. Those of the oppressed who do choose to build the power that comes from knowing how to do useful, meaningful work will therefore go far. Consider the constructive example of the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado. Consider Titus 3:14. And don't let the terror which your oppressor seeks to instill divert you from patiently building your power by the daily practice of beautifully good work. To put it another way, don't let these evil people get inside your OODA loop.
There is more good news: Facebook, Twitter, Google and Apple have surgically removed Donald Trump's metaphorical mouth. He can't post garbage online, and the Parler site has been denied access to the Google Store. Lastly, I just want to say God Bless Arnold Schwarzenegger! Just when I was ready to write off all Republicans as irredeemably evil, former Governor Schwarzenegger has forced me to eat my words. And get this: he is leading an initiative to restore voting access to as many disenfranchised Americans as possible. (See this and this also.)
It is with great satisfaction that I am enjoying some of the news this evening. The Democratic Party has just retaken control of the United States Senate. This was due in no small part to the groundswell of community organizing and constructive resistance in the African-American community. This encourages me to add diligence to my own organizing plans. I also find it bitingly funny that the African-American players in the WNBA managed to oust a team owner from the U.S. Senate.
The news is not all good, however. The supporters of Donald Trump - consisting mainly of white evangelicals who don't seem to read their Bibles - rioted in Washington DC to prevent the Congressional ratification of Joe Biden as the next President. These are the people who regularly use the term "thugs" to describe unarmed people of color. Who are the real thugs here? Even in this, however, there is a silver lining: those who study strategic nonviolent resistance know that violence always backfires against those who choose to be violent. As a result of the violence of the pro-Trump rioters (who were incited by Trump himself), some of the Republican members of Congress who had intended to object to Biden's ratification have chosen instead to support him. Even Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell have turned against Trump. Trump has become a lame duck in every sense of the word, as it was Vice President Pence who coordinated with the military to call National Guard troops to stop the rioting. Clearly Trump is no longer counted among the adults in the room.
For you who are among the marginalized and oppressed, continue to organize constructive resistance! Continue to remain nonviolent. Continue to speak truth to power. Support those even among the Republicans who are finally beginning to speak truth.
One last thing. I believe it is time for those of us who desire to be decent people to organize a permanent boycott of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and possibly YouTube as well. The role of these social media platforms in facilitating the kind of chaos that has characterized the Trump years is undeniable. The boycott should therefore last until the owners of these platforms are bankrupt.
I have a ton of things I need to do away from a computer today. So I won't have time to write another research-heavy post. But I will provide readers with a plan of what I intend to cover in future posts.
First, it appears increasingly undeniable that Joe Biden will become the President of the United States on January 20 of next year. Trump's courtroom challenges to the legal election results continue to be stricken down. Yet Trump continues with his courtroom challenges, even though these challenges have no merit. It can be clearly seen that Trump is trying to invalidate votes cast by people of color. It can also be seen that there are yet many Americans who continue to align themselves with White supremacy and with Trump as their leader. Therefore, I will continue my series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy. Those of us who have been historical targets of oppression will need to continue to study the ways in which we can use strategic nonviolent resistance to neutralize the power of our oppressors.
Second, I want to continue to discuss the ways in which the outworkings of damnation move through an evil society. I have focused almost exclusively on the United States in my previous posts, but I want to shift the focus to include Russia, which is another evil society that is now reaping what it has sown.
Lastly, I want to write posts which explore how decent people can navigate these difficult days. Meanwhile, please read what the Reverend William Barber has to say about the United States of America. I like this man's perspective! "Well, I was trained in theology that whatever you call your spiritual experience, if it does not produce a quarrel with the world, then the claim to be spiritual is suspect..." Maybe this lack of genuine spiritual experience of conversion explains why so many American evangelicals who claim nowadays that they have been "saved" and "born again" look more like Freddy Krueger than the Lord Jesus Christ.
Today's post continues our discussion of Chapter 3 of the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp. This will be the last post that deals with Chapter 3. The next post in this series will begin to cover Chapter 4. The book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D) teaches how oppressed peoples can use strategic nonviolent resistance to shatter the power of their oppressors. This knowledge is especially appropriate for these days, in which a number of racist, White supremacist and Global Far Right leaders have in the last decade come to power in many nations, including the United States, where Donald Trump was illegally helped into his seat of power by Vladimir Putin and the Russian government. (The Russians helped many of the other authoritarian strongmen come to power as well.) Mr. Trump has clearly and legally lost the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, yet he is refusing to concede his loss and he is resisting being ejected from the seat of power which he has occupied (a seat which he has been soiling) for the last four years. Therefore, it is quite possible that oppressed people in the United States will have to use the methods of strategic nonviolent resistance in order to achieve regime change right here in the U.S.A.
Chapter 3 of From D to D explains how an oppressed population can shatter the power of a dictator or oppressor by the mass withdrawal of political and economic cooperation from the oppressor's regime. But that noncooperation works best when it is exercised as a coordinated effort by the independent institutions and groups of the oppressed society. Note that by "independent" we mean those groups and institutions that are not controlled by the dictator or his administration. Sharp listed a number of normally independent groups and institutions which are also normally apolitical, such as families, gardening clubs, sports clubs, musical groups, and the like. As noted in an earlier post in this series, in order for such normally apolitical groups to become part of a strategic nonviolent resistance movement, they must be politicized or co-opted by movement organizers.
But the organizers must also know how to build organizations from scratch. And the organizers of a movement of strategic nonviolent resistance against oppression will want to build organizations whose main purpose from the outset is to contribute to the liberation struggle. Such organizations are called social movement organizations. To learn more about how these work, we will today consider the teachings of Saru Jayaraman (who is featured in the video above, in which she gave a lecture to the Resistance School Berkeley), Sidney Tarrow, Asef Bayat, and Marshall Ganz. I will try to summarize below some of the key points in the video lecture which Saru gave in her lecture.
So first, what is organizing? Many people today who talk of organizing use the term to refer to getting a bunch of people together for a short-term, limited engagement like a protest march or rally. However, according to those who study organizing, the correct term for such activity is actually mobilizing and not organizing. Similarly, get-out-the-vote drives are not really organizing, but mobilizing, as are such activities as getting people to sign petitions or getting people to click on an Internet link, or to put bumper stickers on their cars.
Another activity that is often called organizing is getting people who are well-off and who have disposable income and free time to advocate for people who are not well-off. But again, students of organizing would not call this organizing, but activism or advocacy. This is because the people who are active are usually people with power and resources who are active on behalf of those without power and resources, and the people with power therefore assume that the people without power have no agency over their own lives. Advocacy and activism can also be expressed in the providing of services, in which the people without power are provided with things like clothing, food, educational programs, and the like - things which are normally denied to the people without power because of the structural imbalances between the people with power and the people without power.
Activism, services and mobilizing have their place. But they by themselves do not fundamentally shift the imbalance of power between the powerful and the powerless that causes the deprivations suffered by the powerless in the first place. This can only be done by organizing, which Saru defines as "collective action led by the people most affected [by the power imbalance], in which the people most affected are engaging in direct action targeting those with power." The people most affected by institutional racism in the United States are the people who are not white. The people most affected by U.S. immigration policies and by the immigration policies enacted by nations aligned with the Global Far Right are the people who live in countries whose economies and societies have been trashed by the United States and by the nations of the Global Far Right. The people most affected by mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex are those people who have been locked up (either through excessive sentencing or through wrongful conviction), and their families. The people most affected by the collapse of the power of organized labor in the United States are the people who have to work low-wage jobs in dangerous conditions - for instance, people who work for Amazon, or who work in meatpacking plants.
According to Saru, "direct action means face-to-face action that involves risk. [It is] direct confrontation, meaning face-to-face confrontation with a target who has the power to make the decision that affects the people who are most affected...When I say risky I mean that they are doing something that actually involves them showing that they are willing to stand up physically and in a live space." It is this kind of action that challenges and shifts an unjust power structure. So when the British who ruled India decreed that Indians could only buy British goods for which the Indians had to pay British taxes, Gandhi and his followers engaged in the physical act of boycotting British salt by making their own. This was a action by the people most affected, and it involved risk even though it was nonviolent. This action also challenged the existing power structure, and was the beginning of the crumbling of that power structure. This action also was the beginning of Indians winning concrete improvements in their lives. A social movement organization is therefore a group composed of and led by the people most affected, "who are engaged in direct, collective action against those in power but with the goal of winning concrete improvements in people's lives and challenging the power structure."
According to Sidney Tarrow, this collective action must be sustained collective action in order to be considered the basis of a social movement. To quote Saru again, "So, according to Tarrow, a social movement occurs when people with limited resources - in our world, we call that the people most affected - are able to sustain - that word is important - contentious actions in conflict with powerful opponents." (Emphasis mine.) Social movement organizations are the basis of social movements; therefore, social movement organizing is much more than just organizing a march or a petition drive or a mouse click campaign. For a social movement organization is a collection of people who are willing to work together collectively in a sustained manner in order to shift the balance of power between themselves and powerful opponents.
Now the work of a social movement organization is not just to engage in sustained collective action as an organization, but to create an environment in which, according to Saru, "something else happens and gives way to a much broader, much wider movement in which many more people...who are not affiliated with any organization...are suddenly across a very wide swath of society engaging in contentions actions over a long period of time." When the social movement organizations trigger this kind of sustained societal shift in behavior, that's when a social movement is born. These movements, are, however, built on the ongoing, patient work of social movement organizations. It is a series of patiently accumulated small steps and small victories which lead to the big breakthrough movement moments.
The necessary initial work of a social movement organization must first be to teach the people most affected to begin to reclaim agency over their lives. This is done by building structures of self-reliance. As Gene Sharp says in Chapter 1 of From D to D, "A liberation struggle is a time for self-reliance and internal strengthening of the struggle group." Therefore, the movement organization must begin to build its own means of taking care of the needs of its members. To illustrate this, let's look at some of the demands of some of the Black Lives Matter chapters in the United States. One of those demands is the demand for equal access to quality education for Black and Brown children. But the people who have set up inequitable systems of education did so for a reason. Therefore, what makes BLM think that these people will respond to the demand of the people most affected to change these systems? Instead of demanding decency and humanity from people who don't have any, why doesn't BLM organize its own education system as a necessary prerequisite to organizing a crippling mass boycott of the system set up by the dominant culture? When racist teachers who are part of punitive schools face empty classrooms, they learn quickly that their jobs are in danger! Similarly, the low-wage workers who are employed by exploitative employers must begin to build the self-reliance they need in order to go without work for a while in the event of a strike. Building self-reliance of this kind is not easy when you're being exploited, yet it has been done time after time by people who successfully liberated themselves. The United Farm Workers did this very thing when they built the structures which enabled them to use strikes and boycotts against large California farms in the 1960's.
The building of structures of self-reliance is also the means by which social movement organizers chip away at the legitimacy of the structures of the dominant culture. For if the structures built by the powerless actually work better than the structures built by the powerful, people will start to notice! Thus Asef Bayat, in his book Life as Politics, says "I envision a strategy whereby every social group generates change in society through active citizenship in their immediate domains: children at home and at schools, students in colleges, teachers in classrooms, workers in factories, the poor in their neighborhoods, athletes in stadiums, artists through their art, intellectuals through media, women at home and as public actors. Not only are they to voice their claims, broadcast violations done unto them, and make themselves heard, but also to take responsibility for excelling at what they do. An authoritarian regime should not be a reason for not producing excellent novels, brilliant handicrafts, math champions, world- class athletes, dedicated teachers, or a global film industry. Excellence is power; it is identity." (Emphasis added.)
This concludes our study of the necessary groundwork that must be laid by the people most affected by oppression in today's world, the people most threatened by White supremacy, the Global Far Right, and the collection of strongmen who want to Make Their People Great Again by trashing all the other peoples on earth. We will next begin a discussion of strategy. However, I may also decide to write a post describing the Global Far Right in terms of a religious cult, and describe in that post how we might use some of the resources created by cult researchers such as Steve Hassan to reach out to those who are trapped in that cult mindset.
Things in the United States are turning out about as I expected in the aftermath of Joe Biden's election victory over Donald Trump. Trump's response has been what he told us all along that it would be. Indeed, even when Trump ran against Hillary Clinton in 2016, he had told us that he would not accept a legitimate election loss. The deep existential foundations of Trump's malignant narcissism are the motive behind his refusal in 2020 to accept a loss that is becoming more painfully obvious with each passing day.
Over the last four years, Trump has managed to pack many offices of the Federal government with sycophants who have no principles other than self-seeking loyalty to Trump. Anyone with competence and principles who was part of his administration at any time has by now left. He has packed the Federal judiciary with unrighteous judges. And he is now packing the Pentagon with loyalists.
All of this leads naturally to the question of what decent people in the United States should do if Trump refuses to leave office, or if he succeeds in getting corrupt courts to void a legitimate election, or if he stages a military coup. My answer to such a question is contained in the many posts I have written which explain strategic nonviolent resistance on this blog. Strategic nonviolent resistance is a key component of the struggle of an oppressed people to liberate themselves from a tyrant, dictator, or oppressor. If you're looking for what you can do to contribute to that struggle, please read these posts.
A few points must be made. First, you must get ready to organize with your neighbors. Second, you must organize to massively and collectively withdraw your economic and political cooperation from the system. This will massively raise the costs borne by a Trump dictatorship and make such a dictatorship unsustainable. (Think of such things as strikes and boycotts of large businesses (such as Fox News) that support Trump. DO NOT base your struggle solely on mass protest marches!) Third, you must remain nonviolent in your struggle. This is not just for moral reasons! It is also because the moment you allow violence, you decrease your chances that your liberation struggle will succeed. (If you don't believe me, please read Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan. Or watch some of the YouTube videos of Erica Chenoweth.)
Fourth, you must begin NOW to study strategic nonviolent resistance if you haven't yet started. Fighters who lack skill never win. If you want to win, you must study. But learn only from reputable sources. Here is a short list of sources I consider trustworthy:
One source which I would urge you to stay away from is the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). From their founding up to the end of 2016, their courses and publications presented valuable information and good advice. But from 2017 onward, something began to change. Thus in one of their online courses which took place after 2016, Daniel Dixon of the ICNC suggested that violent and nonviolent forms of resistance could be combined in a movement to make the movement stronger. (By the way, all available evidence on social movements proves the exact opposite.) His exact words were, "An organizing friend of mine likes to talk about 'synergy of tactics' as opposed to 'diversity of tactics'. By this he means that violent forms of protest can work alongside nonviolent forms of protest to create something that is more powerful than either could accomplish individually." This is complete garbage. He is not the only one to make suggestions that are harmful to liberation struggles. Tom Hastings of the ICNC suggested this year that there were times and cases in which a nonviolent resistance movement could help its cause by destroying property. That too is garbage. If you engage in violence (including property destruction) you will make it harder to shift the pillars of support of the dictator's regime. And we want to make it as easy as possible for people who now support Trump to walk away from him.
This weekend, God willing, I will be continuing my series on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Gene Sharp. Stay tuned.
For everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled, and he who humbles himself shall be exalted.
- Luke 14:11
Whenever a person quotes a Bible verse as a maxim, there is a very natural tendency among those who hear him to regard his words as mere moralizing that have no immediate bearing on physical reality. The effect is similar to the effect on people who hear exhortations to quit smoking or to start exercising because of the bad consequences that will come someday - someday... - if they don't. But I have argued in several places on this blog (such as here) that the "someday" consequences of moral choices begin right now, the moment the choices are made, and that they can be observed and empirically measured just as physical phenomena in the natural world can be observed and measured. Therefore it should be possible to observe objectively the outworkings of the Divine humiliation of a person the moment that person begins to exalt himself.
I have also argued that these outworkings (known in this blog as the outworkings of damnation) are now being seen in the United States of America, and that these outworkings can be objectively traced. The United States is a nation that made itself great by oppressing and/or dispossessing people who were poor and nonwhite. But the United States has gone through periods of awakening of conscience in which many of its citizens sought to right the wrongs that were done by the dominant culture against other people. The efforts of these awakened people were, however, opposed and often thwarted by those members of the dominant culture who wanted to remain dominant at all costs. Thus the nation endured a civil war in which Southern plantation owners were economically wiped out because they had built their wealth on the backs of slaves. These Southerners refused to learn the moral lesson of their suffering, and went on to try to recreate as much of their old supremacy as possible. So the United States had to go through a second struggle of conscience, namely the 1960's Civil Rights struggle. However, the gains won during that struggle were again seen by certain members of the dominant culture as an unacceptable threat to their dreams of domination at all costs. For the Civil Rights struggle sought to create a nation (and eventually a world) in which everyone on earth shares the earth on a basis of equality. Those members of the dominant culture who felt threatened by such a world therefore engineered a social movement designed to undo all the progress made by the Civil Rights struggle in order to create a world in which one group of people gets to Make Itself Great Again by trashing everyone else on earth.
And so we come to the present time in which Donald Trump has lost the 2020 U.S. Presidential election by almost five million votes and counting, yet both he and his supporters refuse to concede his loss. The reactionary social movement which put Trump into office in 2016 has been over 40 years in the making. Some of its heavyweight architects include people like Rupert Murdoch (media mogul and owner of News Corporation and the Fox TV network), Ralph Reed (chairman of the Georgia Republican Party and former president of the "Christian Coalition"), Ronald Reagan, and the Koch family. Some of its most influential mouthpieces include Wally George (Blast from the past! Anyone remember him?), Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Tucker Carlson. Donald Trump, therefore, is not just a great big problem, but he is a symptom of a much larger problem.
Rupert Murdoch has famously called Donald Trump an idiot. Note that Murdoch's exact words included an unprintable expletive before the word "idiot", thus signaling Murdoch's extreme distaste and disgust for Trump. But Rupert Murdoch must realize that Trump is a creation of Murdoch and of his media empire. Has Trump played fast and loose with reality and truth? So has Murdoch, whose media outlets have lied about everything from anthropogenic climate change to the effect of bovine growth hormone on humans who drink milk to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic and on and on. And not only has Murdoch created a head of state whose relationship with the truth is "relaxed" (to quote one of Trump's fellow Republicans), but Murdoch's media empire has created an entire population whose relationship with the truth is similarly relaxed. In fact, it is so relaxed that the sole basis on which these people choose what they will believe is whether or not a statement of fact makes them feel good or grants them their hearts' desire. That desire is for supremacy at all costs. Without these people, there would have been no President Trump.
But reality does not make concessions, which is why, according to the Associated Press, in the 376 U.S. counties with the highest number of new COVID-19 cases per capita, 93 percent of registered voters voted for Trump. Also note that although Trump tried to use his recovery from COVID-19 to assert that the pandemic is no big deal, an analysis by Business Insiderreveals that the treatment he received would have cost the average American $650,000 out of pocket. That means that a lot of diehard true believers in Trump are going to die soon. And the attitude of Trump supporters concerning the pandemic is a symptom of their self-destructive attitude toward reality itself.
For it can be argued that malignant narcissism is a progressive disease with an ultimately terminal outcome in 100 percent of cases. The first stage begins with callous disregard of the rights of others and of our duty toward others. The last stage begins with flagrant, self-destructive disregard of reality itself. This is illustrated beautifully in a paper I read a few months ago titled, "Why Tyrants Go Too Far: Malignant Narcissism and Absolute Power." The abstract to this paper begins thus: "This article explores the puzzling behavior of tyrants who undermine themselves once in power..." The author, Betty Glad, outlines the following progression:
Stage 1: A narcissism which aspires for greatness, yet which is held in check by the reality of the challenges of climbing a ladder of success.
Stage 2: The diminishing of the narcissist's ability to test reality once he reaches his desired level of supremacy.
Stage 3: The narcissist's acting out his fantasies of greatness instead of grounding his actions in a reasonable response to reality.
Stage 4 (the final stage): The narcissist's crashing and burning against that cold, hard reality which he refused to acknowledge.
I would argue that Trump and his supporters are now somewhere between stages 3 and 4. I would like therefore to use an example from my own personal history to sketch how I think the Trump presidency might end.
As I mentioned way back in the early days of my blogging, I used to be a member of a religious cult (or if you want to be euphemistic, an "abusive church") known as the Assemblies of George Geftakys. George Geftakys was, of course, a classic malignant narcissist. And as such a narcissist, he soon passed into stage 3 of the progression I outlined above. That stage for him consisted of pretending that he and his family were the picture of perfection even though he was forcing young women in his assemblies to become his personal secretaries so that he could force himself on them sexually, and even though he knew that his oldest son was a wife-beater and child abuser. His crash-and-burn phase came when the sins of his family became widely known to the members of the cult he had built. What is interesting is what came afterward, when many members of the cult confronted George, and eventually forced his excommunication.
These members (many of whom became ex-members like me) thought that by confronting George and his henchmen we could get them to acknowledge their wrongdoing and repent. THAT NEVER HAPPENED. For it would have required George to admit that his whole life as he had presented it to us had been a fraud. Instead, he and his wife moved to an upscale retirement community in the California Inland Empire, where he continued to advertise himself as a great missionary and pastor, adding to this that he was a native of Greece even though he had told us that he was born in the U.S.A. To the very end of his life, George continued to live in a bubble of self-aggrandizing fantasy. Given the parallels between the demise of George Geftakys and the current state of Donald Trump and his supporters, I expect something similar to happen now. We should prepare ourselves to deal with it.
P.S. If you want to hear more about George's final crash-and-burn phase, click here.
You have lost your bid for re-election. I know that the Bible says that we are to be subject to our leaders. But you have two strikes against you. First, our subjection to our leaders carries only as far as their subjection to an impartial moral standard that is larger than them. You have refused to submit to that standard for most of your life, and you have refused to submit to that standard during every single day of your presidency. And you refuse to submit to the laws of a nation in which you legitimately and fairly lost the November 2020 presidential election.
Therefore, I will not submit to you at all or acknowledge you as the President of the United States after January 19th, 2021. If you are still occupying the White House on January 21st, 2021, I intend to do everything I can to build a nonviolent liberation struggle to oust you. Your narcissism, your nihilism, and your associations with thugs such as Vladimir Putin must end. To use a phrase of yours that has recently been much quoted, you're fired.
