Together We Are The Resistance

Happy Fourth of July

This is the first Fourth of July statement I have ever made. But this year it feels necessary to reach out to American friends, allies and comrades in the fight against the fascist gangsters.

I began The Resistance on Substack as a mad scramble — a way to rally Canadians and find ways to defend our border from an unprecedented threat coming from Washington.

And then something remarkable happened: Americans began reaching out.

You sent messages of encouragement. You shared your fears. You started to speak of your determination to take back your country.

As more and more Americans joined this community, I began to understand that the fight for democracy, the rule of law, and decency are the true ties that bind us together on this continent.

The Resistance now has supporters in every state in the union. If someone had told me back in February that this would be the case, I wouldn't have believed them.

And the continued work of The Resistance with MeidasTouch is helping to extend this conversation to allies on the ground all over the world, including Ireland, Australia, the UK, New Zealand, and the Netherlands.

A movement of democracy is emerging in the face of an authoritarian menace.

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This Fourth of July comes in very dark times, and it will get darker.

In the space of only a few months, we have gone from seeing people being kidnapped off the streets, to arbitrary threats of stripping citizenship from political enemies, to the construction of concentration camps.

The footage of Donald Trump gleefully talking about watching detainees attempting to outrun alligators…

That tells us everything.

Sadism has become state policy. This celebration of depravity is showing us that much, much darker abuses are very possible.

I say possible, but not inevitable.

As Antonio Gramsci wrote from a fasict prison:

“The old world is dying and a new world is struggling to be born. We are in the time of monsters.”

He called this the interegnum — an old Roman term for the in-between time when one emperor died and another had yet to take control. A time when the rule of law was suspended, and anything became possible.

Trump's viciousness and spectacles of cruelty place him not with any past presidents, but with the likes of Caligula or Nero.

We are in the in-between time.

Between a much darker future that looms and an alternative future where together we push back and resist. This is the interregnum, and it is where we find ourselves on the first Fourth of July under Trump's rule.

Today, I want to acknowledge the grassroots resistance: those standing against Trump and ICE, those participating in the No Kings rallies and those who confront masked individuals in the streets.

It is tough and frightening work. But let's take a moment to consider the values and the culture of decency that we are standing up for.

Our shared North American culture — like our people — is a complex mix of influences, ideas, and roots. It does not make us weak. It makes us strong.

As Canadians, we draw inspiration from the best of your traditions: Woody Guthrie, Martin Luther King Jr., Billie Holiday, and Angela Davis.

The America we love is multiracial, multicultural, the great melting pot and stew.

We must not let that beautiful mix be destroyed by the haters, the incels and the false Christian white supremacists.

We are better than that.

The fight ahead will be long and hard. We will need to continually refresh ourselves from the deep well of our shared cultural stories.

We have a lot work to do. Let's do it together.

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