What We Demand and Why We Can't Wait

This is the full text of a petition that is currently circulating and has not yet been submitted to President Donald Trump. To sign the petition, you must be a Citizen of the United States of America, and sign here.

I: What We Demand

We the People of these United States of America, believing that a nation of free and enlightened people ought to be governed by those people, and in order to preserve the Union of these States and all the values for which it stands, hereby issue this list of demands to the government and administration of President Donald J. Trump and the United States Congress:

1. The immediate, unconditional resignations and abdications of President Donald J. Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Attorney-General William Barr, and the Trump regime;
2. The abolition of the Electoral College;
3. The abolition of the United States Senate;
4. Universal living income programs, and the abolition of broken unemployment insurance programs;
5. Universal housing programs;
6. Universal equal rights;
7. Universal suffrage, including state and federal voting holidays;
8. Universal citizenship tests in the subjects of history, ethics, and global affairs for every candidate who chooses to run for any elected public office in the United States, at any level of government, including the Office of the President;
9. Universal healthcare, including universal dentistry and other necessary health disciplines;
10. A Constitutional Amendment overturning the U.S.S.C. ruling on Citizens United;
11. Nationwide police reform, including widespread police demilitarization, graduated fining brackets, and prison reform.

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II: What We Promise

We declare ourselves to be a non-violent, pro-democracy, direct-action movement.

We condemn violence, terrorism, and the use of unnecessary force.

We promise to set an example of unity when those around us would see us divided.

We promise to set an example of courage and morality when malicious actors would seek to lower us.

We promise ourselves to the true values of democracy. We respect the rights of our members to disagree with each other and to speak freely regarding those disagreements. We respect the rights of all humans to speak with the ultimate sovereignty of their own voices.

Whenever necessary, we promise to cooperate with law enforcement and government authorities in order to report any terrorists who might attempt to infiltrate our movement or sidetrack this country into a violent civil war, whether those terrorists come from the left or the right, and whether they be foreign or domestic, and regardless of whatever other variables might occur.

We promise that we shall act in kindness, not in hatred, and that we shall act with the goal of creating, not of destroying.

We promise to respect and uphold the values of the People of the United States of America.

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III: Why We Can’t Wait

In March and April of 2020, my fellow journalists and I warned the country about the high risk of another American civil war surrounding the elections in November of 2020.

There is a dangerously high probability that neither the conduct nor the results of the 2020 Presidential Election will be credible, fair, or legitimate.

The United States lacks federally consistent voting laws and procedures in the context of a pandemic. The President of the United States himself is making overt efforts to disenfranchise entire groups of American voters. Trump has attempted to run the post office into bankruptcy, to discredit absentee voting, and to punish states which prepare for voting this November.

If a second COVID-19 wave does occur, we can expect certain polling centers to shut down. Those centers which do close will be in populated urban centers where voters are disproportionately Democratic. Voter participation will be highly skewed in this scenario, with millions of voters unable to cast their ballots—most of them belonging to a single party, which Donald Trump has vowed to defeat.

In sum, it is highly probable that these elections will be disputed.

Furthermore, the President said during his 2016 campaign trail that he will not concede in the event that he loses. Since then, multiple White House sources have expressed concern that he will not concede power in a peaceful transition.

Disputed national elections within this sort of highly volatile political setting are an extremely common trigger event for civil wars. Consequently, the risk of civil war and widespread violence is projected to escalate dramatically in November of 2020.

We did not, however, anticipate that the President of the United States himself would deliberately attempt to instigate a civil war on his own terms many months before the election ever took place. That appears to be precisely what Donald Trump is now doing.

Riots surrounding the death of George Floyd have spread to major American cities, as equally dismissive of State borders as COVID-19 has been. For a brief moment, America was united in its grief. American leadership had an opportunity to unite the nation with this crisis, to heal, and to move forward.

And then the President opened up Twitter.

On May 28^th, 2020, the President of the United States posted a video saying “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat”.

On May 29^th, the President of the United States issued a statement which reads: “…when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

On May 30^th, the President of the United States referred to the murder of unarmed American civilian protestors as “good [target] practice.”

In the same statement on May 30^th, the President of the United States mobilized his own personal extremist militia, calling on this militia to flood Washington, D.C. and fight the protestors. Right-wing militants responded to his call not only in D.C., but everywhere across the country.

In the one week since these events began, the United States has fallen apart. As of June 2^nd, 2020, thirty-six journalists have been shot, seventy-six journalists have been attacked, and nineteen journalists have been arrested for covering the protests nationwide. The free press, and free speech itself, has been the deliberate target of an authoritarian regime that seeks to oppress the freedom of assembly and the rights of the citizen to petition for a redress of grievances.

Each and every one of these incidents suggests that the President is openly attempting to incite a second American civil war. Accounting for all of them together, we cannot afford to entertain any naïve hope that this is not the case. It becomes clearer and clearer that President Trump is deliberating acting to destroy the United States of America.

The President of the United States knows the risk of conflict is high heading into November. His efforts to incite a civil war at the end of May prove that his chief ambition, far from preventing such a conflict, is to escalate that conflict many months in advance of its natural course.

Doing so gives the President an opportunity to oversee the direction of that conflict from the very start, and will give him a decisive advantage in orchestrating that conflict leading into November of 2020. His goal is to delegitimize the November elections and to consolidate his own power in a contested election scenario.

To wait until November is to say that we should risk the loss of a free United States to the rule of a tyrant who would see this nation reduced to civil war.

We cannot wait. We must overthrow the state.