Elon Musk at the second inauguration of President Donald Trump, January 20, 2025
After volunteering to serve as a U.S. Marine in Vietnam, John Kelly engaged a life of service throughout a distinguished military career. Between July 31, 2017 and December 14, 2018, Kelly served as Chief of Staff to President Donald Trump, the longest term of service of any of Trump’s chiefs of staff. On January 7, 2021, Kelly spoke out about the attack on violent the U.S. Capitol, assigning full responsibility for the attack to Trump personally. “What happened on Capitol Hill yesterday is a direct result of his poisoning the minds of people with the lies and the frauds.” In multiple subsequent interviews, Kelly told reporters that he believed Trump to be a “fascist” in personality, intention and leadership. Kelly deliberately chose that term, and he used it repeatedly to describe his former boss and Commander in Chief. “Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy.” Kelly said that definition accurately described Trump as he observed him in the White House during the months of his service.
Is “fascist” the right word? That question raises issues of definition, meaning and history, as well as the strategy and tactics of communication for those seeking to expand the tent of resistance and non-cooperation, and not push people away. For those interested to explore this issue in depth, I encourage you to read the work of Anne Applebaum, M. Gessen, Timothy Snyder, and Jason Stanley, distinguished historians and journalists who have reached the conclusion that “fascist” is indeed the correct word, and that we need to face this reality squarely if our democracy is to survive.
I find the analysis offered by Applebaum, Gessen, Snyder, and Stanley to be deeply persuasive and urgently compelling. But I am not engaging this literature in this MLK holiday post (as I expect to do over the coming weeks.) Rather, the purpose of this essay is to honor Dr. King by studying and discussing Dr. King’s own analysis of these questions as they applied to American history from the legislation and terror of Jim Crow to the conspiracy theories of Senator Joe McCarthy and his allies, from the America First Movement to the candidacy of Barry Goldwater, who Dr. King argued sought to bring America down “a dangerous fascist path.” My purpose is to highlight Dr. King’s own words on three occasions: Dr. King’s sermon “The False God of Nationalism” delivered at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, on July 12, 1953, and broadcast on Atlanta’s WERD, the first black-owned radio station in the United States; his Address to the National Biennial Convention of the American Jewish Congress, delivered on May 14, 1958 in Miami Beach, Florida; and his Nobel Prize lecture (“The quest for peace and justice”) delivered on December 11, 1964 in Oslo Norway. In each case I set out excerpts of a longer text.
Before proceeding to review Dr. King’s words, I want to address a preliminary issue. The word “fascist” does not need to refer to the specific forms of authoritarian rule as implemented in Italy between 1922 to 1945, in Germany between 1933 and 1945, or in the countries occupied by Nazi forces in World War Two. Just as Hitler and Mussolini differed considerably, so do other leaders who can be described by that term. Fascism, like any other form of political ideology and rule, necessarily takes very different forms in each national context. But there can be important and useful correspondences, as can be highlighted, for example, in the way that Nazi officials studied the ideology of Manifest Destiny, the colonization of the American west, the genocide of Native Americans, and the racist apartheid of Jim Crow segregation to develop a blueprint for the ideology of Lebenstraum, conquest of European neighbors, development of Nazi anti-Jewish laws, and the genocide of the Jewish people. See James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton, 2017).
1) Dr. King’s sermon “The False God of Nationalism” delivered at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, on July 12, 1953, excerpts:
“Our age is one in which men have turned away from the eternal God of the universe, and decided to worship at the shrine of the god of nationalism…This new religion has its familiar prophets and preachers. In Germany it was preached by Hitler. In Italy it was preached by Mussolini. And in America it is being preached by the McCarthy’s and the Jenners, the advocators of white supremacy, and the America First movements. [King refers to Republican U.S. senator Joseph R. McCarthy and his Republican Senate colleague William Ezra Jenner who together supported unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about a supposed Communist “deep state” that supposedly controlled Presidents Eisenhower and Truman, and the Democratic Party]. Strangely enough all of these nationalistic preachers have an amazing amount of homilectical skill, so much so that the number of their converts has risen to astronomical proportions.
“The preachers of this new religion are so convinced of its supremacy that they are determined to persecute anyone who does not accept its tenets. And so today many sincere lovers of democracy and believers of the Christian principle are being scorned and persecuted because they will not worship the god of nationalism. We live in an age when it is almost heresy to affirm the brotherhood of man…
“Yet, we all know of the great tragedies that have resulted from the worship of this false god of nationalism. More than anything else nationalism makes for war…. if we are to avoid being plunged across the abyss of atomic destruction, we must transcend the narrow confines of nationalism. Nationalism must give way to internationalism.
“One cannot worship this false god of nationalism and the God of christianity at the same time. The two are incompatible and all the dialectics of the logicians cannot make them exist together. We must choose whom we will serve. Will we continue to serve the false god that places absolute national sovereignty first or will we serve the God in whom there is no east nor west? Will we continue to serve the false god of imperialistic greed or will we serve the God who makes love the key which unlocks the door of peace and security. Will we continue to serve the false god of racial prejudice or will we serve the God who made of one blood all men to dwell upon the face of the earth.
“Today we need prophetic voices willing to cry out against the false god of nationalism. I realize that such a venture might bring about the possibility of being called many undesirable names. But speak we must if we are to acknowledge the sovereignty [of God] against the claims of the false god nationalism we must affirm the supremacy of the eternal God of the universe, the Father of all mankind…”
2) Martin Luther King, Jr., Address to the National Biennial Convention of the American Jewish Congress, delivered on May 14, 1958 in Miami Beach, Florida, excerpts:
“My people were brought to America in chains. Your people were driven here to escape the chains fashioned for them in Europe. Our unity is born of our common struggle for centuries, not only to rid ourselves of bondage, but to make oppression of any people by others an impossibility….
“One of history’s most despicable tyrants, Adolph Hitler, sought to redefine morality as a good exclusively for the Arian race. He bathed mankind in oceans of blood, murdering millions of Jews, old and young, and even the unborn. Negroes saw that such hideous racism, though not immediately applied to them, must sooner or later encompass them, and willingly they supported the struggle to achieve his defeat.
“There are Hitlers loose in America today, both in high and low places. As the tensions and bewilderment of economic broblems become more severe, history scapegoats, the Jews, will be joined by new scapegoats, the Negroes. The Hitlers will seek to divert people’s minds and turn their frustrations and anger to the helpless, to the outnumbered. Then whether the Negro and Jew shall live in peace will depend upon how firmly they resist, how effectively they reach the minds of the decent Americans to halt this deadly diversion.
“Every Negro leader is keenly aware, from direct and personal experience, that the segregationists make no fine distinctions between the Negro and the Jew. The irrational hatred motivating his actions is as readily turned against Catholic, Jew, Quaker, Liberal and One-Worlder, as it is against the Negro. Some have jeered at Jews with Negroes; some have bombed the homes and churches of Negroes; and in recent acts of inhuman barbarity, some have bombed your synagogues—indeed right here in Florida. Have the Nazis murdered Catholic Poles and Jews, Protestant Norwegian and Jews, the races of America fly blindly at both of us caring not at all which of us falls. Their aim is to maintain through cruel segregation groups whose uses as scapegoats can facilitate their political and social rule over all people. Our common fight is against these deadly enemies of democracy, and our glory is that we are chosen to prove that courage is a characteristic of oppressed people, however cynically and brutally they are denied full equality and freedom…
“Let us both realize that history has thrust upon us an indescribably important destiny—to complete a process of democratization which our nation has developed too slowly, but which is our most powerful weapon for world respect and emulation.
“America, the first nation to electrify the world with a new concept of man’s capability of self-rule without monarchs or regents, must fulfill the promises of its constitution and Declaration of Independence. Failing this, no power of nuclear weapon or limitless wealth can prevent the steady erosion and diminishing of its grandeur in a century of climactic changes.”
3) Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel Prize lecture (“The quest for peace and justice”) delivered on December 11, 1964 in Oslo Norway, excerpts.
“This evening I would like to use this lofty and historic platform to discuss what appears to me to be the most pressing problem confronting mankind today. Modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think and instruments that peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space. He has built gigantic bridges to span the seas and gargantuan buildings to kiss the skies. His airplanes and spaceships have dwarfed distance, placed time in chains, and carved highways through the stratosphere. This is a dazzling picture of modern man’s scientific and technological progress.
“Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers…
“This problem of spiritual and moral lag, which constitutes modern man’s chief dilemma, expresses itself in three larger problems which grow out of man’s ethical infantilism. Each of these problems, while appearing to be separate and isolated, is inextricably bound to the other. I refer to racial injustice, poverty, and war.
“The first problem that I would like to mention is racial injustice. The struggle to eliminate the evil of racial injustice constitutes one of the major struggles of our time…. In the United States we have witnessed the gradual demise of the system of racial segregation. The Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools gave a legal and constitutional deathblow to the whole doctrine of separate but equal. The Court decreed that separate facilities are inherently unequal and that to segregate a child on the basis of race is to deny that child equal protection of the law. This decision came as a beacon light of hope to millions of disinherited people. Then came that glowing day a few months ago when a strong Civil Rights Bill became the law of our land. This bill, which was first recommended and promoted by President Kennedy, was passed because of the overwhelming support and perseverance of millions of Americans, Negro and white. It came as a bright interlude in the long and sometimes turbulent struggle for civil rights: the beginning of a second emancipation proclamation providing a comprehensive legal basis for equality of opportunity. Since the passage of this bill we have seen some encouraging and surprising signs of compliance. I am happy to report that, by and large, communities all over the southern part of the United States are obeying the Civil Rights Law and showing remarkable good sense in the process.
“Another indication that progress is being made was found in the recent presidential election in the United States. The American people revealed great maturity by overwhelmingly rejecting a presidential candidate who had become identified with extremism, racism, and retrogression. The voters of our nation rendered a telling blow to the radical right. They defeated those elements in our society which seek to pit white against Negro and lead the nation down a dangerous Fascist path… [The official publication of Dr. King’s Nobel lecture indicates in a footnote: “Lyndon B. Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater by a popular vote of 43, 128, 956 to 27,177,873.”].
“… We must still face prodigious hilltops of opposition and gigantic mountains of resistance. But with patient and firm determination we will press on until every valley of despair is exalted to new peaks of hope, until every mountain of pride and irrationality is made low by the leveling process of humility and compassion; until the rough places of injustice are transformed into a smooth plane of equality of opportunity; and until the crooked places of prejudice are transformed by the straightening process of bright-eyed wisdom.
“What the main sections of the civil rights movement in the United States are saying is that the demand for dignity, equality, jobs, and citizenship will not be abandoned or diluted or postponed. If that means resistance and conflict we shall not flinch. We shall not be cowed. We are no longer afraid.
“The word that symbolizes the spirit and the outward form of our encounter is nonviolence, and it is doubtless that factor which made it seem appropriate to award a peace prize to one identified with struggle. Broadly speaking, nonviolence in the civil rights struggle has meant not relying on arms and weapons of struggle. It has meant noncooperation with customs and laws which are institutional aspects of a regime of discrimination and enslavement. It has meant direct participation of masses in protest, rather than reliance on indirect methods which frequently do not involve masses in action at all.
“Nonviolence has also meant that my people in the agonizing struggles of recent years have taken suffering upon themselves instead of inflicting it on others. It has meant, as I said, that we are no longer afraid and cowed. But in some substantial degree it has meant that we do not want to instill fear in others or into the society of which we are a part. The movement does not seek to liberate Negroes at the expense of the humiliation and enslavement of whites. It seeks no victory over anyone. It seeks to liberate American society and to share in the self-liberation of all the people.
“Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding: it seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.
“In a real sense nonviolence seeks to redeem the spiritual and moral lag that I spoke of earlier as the chief dilemma of modern man. It seeks to secure moral ends through moral means. Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. Indeed, it is a weapon unique in history, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. I believe in this method because I think it is the only way to reestablish a broken community. It is the method which seeks to implement the just law by appealing to the conscience of the great decent majority who through blindness, fear, pride, and irrationality have allowed their consciences to sleep.
“The nonviolent resisters can summarize their message in the following simple terms: we will take direct action against injustice despite the failure of governmental and other official agencies to act first. We will not obey unjust laws or submit to unjust practices. We will do this peacefully, openly, cheerfully because our aim is to persuade. We adopt the means of nonviolence because our end is a community at peace with itself. We will try to persuade with our words, but if our words fail, we will try to persuade with our acts. We will always be willing to talk and seek fair compromise, but we are ready to suffer when necessary and even risk our lives to become witnesses to truth as we see it…
“This approach to the problem of racial injustice is not at all without successful precedent. It was used in a magnificent way by Mohandas K. Gandhi to challenge the might of the British Empire and free his people from the political domination and economic exploitation inflicted upon them for centuries. He struggled only with the weapons of truth, soul force, non-injury, and courage…
“All that I have said boils down to the point of affirming that mankind’s survival is dependent upon man’s ability to solve the problems of racial injustice, poverty, and war; the solution of these problems is in turn dependent upon man squaring his moral progress with his scientific progress, and learning the practical art of living in harmony. Some years ago a famous novelist died. Among his papers was found a list of suggested story plots for future stories, the most prominently underscored being this one: “A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together.” This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited a big house, a great “world house” in which we have to live together – black and white, Easterners and Westerners, Gentiles and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Moslem and Hindu, a family unduly separated in ideas, culture, and interests who, because we can never again live without each other, must learn, somehow, in this one big world, to live with each other.
“This means that more and more our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. We must now give an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in our individual societies…. This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men…
Correspondences and differences, 1964-2025
Tragically, Trump’s “fascist path” of 2025 is far more dangerous than Goldwater threatened in 1964: first, in contrast to Goldwater, Trump triumphed in the popular vote and electoral college; second, Trump himself, and his MAGA ideology, is far more threatening to democracy, human rights and the global environment than Goldwater was in 1964.
Reflecting on the political demographics of the time helps provide context for Dr. King’s strategic perspective and related public remarks, and enables us to usefully compare the analysis he offered in his Nobel lecture to our current political circumstances.
Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, a significant portion of both major parties opposed Dr. King and the civil rights movement. In an address delivered at an NAACP Emancipation Day Rally in Atlanta on January 1, 1957, Martin Luther King, Jr. analyzed the political demographics of the era:
Actually, the Negro has been betrayed by both the Democratic and the Republican parties. The Democrats have betrayed us by capitulating to the whims and caprices of the southern Dixiecrats. The Republicans have betrayed us by capitulating to the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing reactionary northern Republicans. And this coalition of southern Dixiecrats and northern right-wing Republicans defeats every liberal move that goes before Congress.
At the same time, there was significant bipartisan support for ending racial segregation — support that was dramatically growing, in both parties, in large measure because of pressure generated by Dr. King’s nonviolent campaigns.
At that time, the Democratic Party was bitterly torn between the southern Dixiecrats, led by South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond and Mississippi Senator James Eastland, and the party’s liberal wing, including Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey, Missouri Senator Stuart Symington, Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, California Governor Pat Brown. Republican politicians such as New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Senator Jacob Javits, Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield, and Michigan Governor George Romney were among the most important political leaders supporting Reverend King and the nonviolent black liberation movement.
In the 1930s, many African Americans had become Democrats to support FDR and the expansion of New Deal programs. But many influential leaders within the African American community (including baseball legend Jackie Robinson; Edward Brooke, the first African American senator since Reconstruction; and Martin Luther King senior, known in the family as “Daddy King”) remained dedicated members of the Republican Party and ardently campaigned for its candidates.
It is striking to recall that 80% of House Republicans and 82% of GOP Senators — greater percentages than their Democratic Party counterparts — supported LBJ’s 1964 Civil Right Act.
Dr. King perceived Barry Goldwater as a unique and unprecedented threat because Goldwater was the leading voice among the 18% of Republican Senators who voted to oppose the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and Goldwater was the first Republican presidential candidate to implement a “Southern strategy” designed to exploit white backlash against civil rights. As he told a strategy meeting of southern Republicans in November 1961: “We’re not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc in 1964 and 1968, so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are.” According to former Vice President Richard Nixon, in an April 1962 Ebony Magazine interview, “If Goldwater wins his fight, our party would eventually become the first major all-white political party. And that isn’t good. That would be a violation of GOP principles.”
When the Republican Party nominated Goldwater for President in 1964, Dr. King felt morally obligated to issue the following public statement:
Press Release: Statement from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on Republican Nomination of Senator Barry Goldwater, July 16, 1964:
“It was both unfortunate and disastrous that the Republican Party nominated Barry Goldwater as its candidate for President of the United States. In foreign policy, Mr. Goldwater advocated a narrow nationalism, a crippling isolationism, and a trigger-happy attitude that could plunge the whole world into the dark abyss of annihilation. On social and economic issues, Mr. Goldwater represented an unrealistic conservatism that was totally out of touch with the realities of the twentieth century… Senator Goldwater had neither the concern nor the comprehension necessary to grapple with this problem of poverty in the fashion that the historical moment dictated.”
“On the urgent issue of civil rights, Senator Goldwater represented a philosophy that was morally indefensible and socially suicidal. While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulated a philosophy which gave aid and comfort to the racist. His candidacy and philosophy would serve as an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes would stand. In the light of these facts and because of my love for America, I had no alternative but to urge every Negro and white person of goodwill to vote against Mr. Goldwater and to withdraw support from any Republican candidate that did not publicly disassociate himself from Senator Goldwater and his philosophy.”
“While I had followed a policy of not endorsing political candidates, I felt that the prospect of Senator Goldwater being President of the United States so threatened the health, morality, and survival of our nation, that I could not in good conscience fail to take a stand against what he represented.”
Goldwater lost the election, but succeeded in seizing control of the Republican Party — and radically transforming it. For the first time since Reconstruction, a Republican won the five states of the Deep South. Bringing Strom Thurmond to the GOP, and campaigning with the Senate’s most famous segregationist throughout the former Confederacy, Goldwater triggered the exodus of the Dixiecrats from the Democratic Party and their conversion into hardcore GOP partisans. As explained by Bernard Cosman, “[t]he result of Goldwater’s southern strategy was the almost complete withdrawal of Negroes from the Republican presidential party.” In the years following his campaign, the once-powerful liberal and moderate wings of the so-called “Party of Lincoln” were eviscerated.
In retrospect, Martin Luther King, Jr’s decision to oppose Goldwater, seems not only correct but prescient. So do his clear warnings of the threats to democracy that appeals to “extremism, racism, and retrogression” represent.
There are haunting similarities between these respective Republican candidates, similarities that demand attention to Dr. King’s grave warnings in 1964. Like Goldwater’s candidacy, Donald Trump political speech has inflamed hatred and prejudice, spread racial division, and mobilized extremist and white supremacist groups on the far right. Like Goldwater, Trump uses “law and order” rhetoric to generate fear, incite bigotry, and persuade millions that urban crime requires an authoritarian response.
But the differences between them are more disturbing than the similarities. Dr. King found Barry Goldwater unqualified for our nation’s highest political office, even though Goldwater was a traditional politician, with many years of public service — first in municipal offices in Phoenix Arizona, and then in the U.S. Senate — before launching his presidential bid.
Moreover, as summarized by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in an afterword to the 2007 Princeton University Press re-issuance of “The Conscience of a Conservative”, Goldwater’s influential, elegantly-written 1960 essay in political philosophy:
Jack Kennedy considered Goldwater a friend and admired him for his many virtues. These included patriotism, courage, humor, his sense of duty and ferocious loyalty to principle, his civility, decency, and his integrity. Goldwater, he knew, was honest as daylight and unafraid to speak his mind. Uncle Jack especially treasured those rare qualities in a politician.
Goldwater “spoke his mind” with a gruff clarity and unpretentious down-home style that charmed opponents as it thrilled supporters, distinguishing himself as a Western big-sky “rugged individualist” with the “guts” to passionately oppose not only the Washington political class but, just as importantly, New York corporations and limousine-riding business tycoons, and commercialism and “the materialist ethic” in all of its morally-degrading manifestations.
In contrast to Trump, Barry Goldwater’s public record includes very significant efforts in support of civil and human rights. Goldwater led the desegregation of the Arizona National Guard. He desegregated his father’s retail business in Phoenix. He was an active member of the Arizona branch of the NAACP. He was especially dedicated in his efforts to help Native Americans in his home state. He voted for all major civil rights bills brought to the Senate before 1964.
As Robert F. Kennedy concluded,
Goldwater was neither mean-spirited nor racist. Nor was he a mere shill for Wall Street or the wealthy elite. Goldwater’s conservatism was always anchored in principle and idealism. For Goldwater, the purpose of government was to foster societies where human potential could flourish.
Finally, it was Barry Goldwater, representing a very different Republican Party, who informed Richard Nixon that he would need to leave office, because loyalty to democracy and rule of law superseded loyalty to the GOP party leader.
In contrast, Donald Trump who violated democratic principles and laws to a far greater extent than Nixon ever did.
Trump embodies and represents the antithesis and negation of the core moral principles, religious beliefs and political ideas upon which Martin Luther King, Jr. lived his life.
No major American figure alive today more clearly symbolizes and promotes the racism, materialism, greed, wealth inequality, nativism, hatred, and mob violence that Dr. King dedicated his life to fighting against.
Conclusion
In March 1967, Dr. King asked his lawyer and close friend Dr. Clarence B. Jones to prepare an initial draft of his important speech on the Vietnam War that King was scheduled to deliver at Riverside Church on April 3. Dr. Jones prepared a draft that was beautifully crafted to protect King from the backlash that Jones correctly predicted would occur if King condemned President Johnson too forcefully for his conduct of the war. Jones’s draft was framed in a lawyerly way (“On the one hand…, On the other hand…”). But King was unhappy with this approach, and got angry with Jones for modulating and softening his message. “The war is either moral or immoral,” King told Jones, and if it is immoral I must not equivocate. King’s final version (written with help from the theologian Vincent Harding) spoke bluntly to condemn Johnson’s war policy, and the human catastrophe that it engendered, in the U.S. as well as in Vietnam itself:
“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.” Martin Luther King, Jr., Beyond Vietnam: Time to Break Silence, Riverside Church, April 3, 1967
Today, on Day 1 of the second Trump Administration, it is already time to break the silence. It is already time to condemn immoral actions that desecrate basic moral principles and violate the fundamental requirements of a decent civil society. It is already time to demand that our country stop marching on the dangerous fascist path that President Trump and his allies are designing for us.
Today President Trump issued an Executive Order closing the border to asylum-seeking migrants. This action cannot stand because it violates our legal obligations under domestic and international refugee law and our moral obligations to offer refuge to those who are legitimately escaping persecution.
Today President Trump issued an Executive Order ending birthright citizenship. This action cannot stand because it violates the 14th Amendment of the United States.
Today President Trump ordered the U.S. military in border security in violation of laws and norms preventing U.S. military forces to be deployed for domestic purposes inside the country.
Today President Trump declared migrant crossings to be a “national emergency” so that he can access federal funds to build a border wall in violation of the Constitutional requirement for Congressional approval for the expenditure of those funds.
Today President Trump issued executive orders removing protections for transgender people in federal prisons and for transgender migrants in U.S. custody, in violation of their fundamental human rights.
Today President Trump declared a national energy emergency to enable him to speed permitting for pipelines and power plants; he announced his intention to loosen regulations on tailpipe pollution and fuel economy standards; he ordered Alaskan wilderness areas to be open to more oil and gas drilling; he ordered the elimination of environmental justice programs across the federal government, programs designed to protect poor communities from excess pollution; and he announced the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris climate agreement — acxions that would result in U.S. fossil fuel emissions greatly exceeding the “carbon budget” required to protect against catastrophic climate change;
All of these executive actions are immoral. They are unjust. They violate legal and ethical obligations. They will bring tremendous harm. They are immensely dangerous.
This is just Day 1, and our nation is already falling deeply in line with the “dangerous fascist path” Dr. King warned us about so prophetically in 1964.
We must refuse cooperation with this immoral, unjust and dangerous regime following Dr. King’s courageous example.
We laud the so-called “Greatest Generation” for fighting fascism in Europe. Now it is time for all decent people, of all generations, to fight fascism here at home by mobilizing all methods of creative, disciplined nonviolence Dr. King taught us to employ in times of grave crisis such as this moment and the next 1,459 days.
Jonathan D. Greenberg
