Refuse Fascism Fund Drive:
At a time when the fascist Trump/Pence regime threatens the future of humanity, your donation to Refuse Fascism makes it possible to change history
January 1, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
As we go to press, volunteers with Refuse Fascism (refusefascism.org) are reaching out to people around the country to contribute to a goal of raising $250,000. This is the organization with the mission: This Nightmare Must End: The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go! And this great cause requires serious money!
One woman who joined the fundraising effort wrote, in an email to dozens of friends and family:
The resistance movement has worked very hard since even before January 2017. We are definitely making strides. It’s not a lost cause. There have been recent victories that give us hope. The key word here is hope. In reality, however, the restoration of democratic leaders piecemeal, seat by seat, is like carrying an umbrella in the force of a tsunami. It doesn’t hurt but.... ☂️🌪💨🌬🌨🌪💨m
So we need more formidable and innovative action and we need it YESTERDAY!
As you may or may not know I have been active in the resistance movement and have become a participant of a group of activists called REFUSE FASCISM. ❌❗️🚫
We are currently doing a massive fundraiser to finance an effective voice to get the word out and to put pressure on our government to impeach and, more importantly, to remove Donald Trump and Mike Pence from office. This is no small feat but the louder our voices against these two monsters are the stronger our chances are of kicking them the FUCK OUT!!! (Read the entire email at the RefuseFascism.org website)
In several cities around the country, Refuse Fascism chapters gathered together over the long weekend of December 15-18. They called friends, family, and the people who have signed up to be part of or in touch with this movement. They talked to hundreds of people. They learned what was on people’s minds. They engaged or re-engaged people with the movement to drive out the regime. And, with the help of a matching grant from a generous donor, they raised the goal for that first weekend of $25,000 plus several thousands more (follow the fund drive in real time here).
As we post this article, Refuse Fascism volunteers are again on the phones to people in a year-end push. Revolution reached out to a couple of those who did phone banking to share insights from the experience.
One person described their experience this way:
A lot of people were happy to hear from us. Everybody that signed up had signed up for a reason. We weren’t able to reach everybody. We did leave messages. The good sort of thing, that we summed up afterwards, people were donating from the text messages and also from some voice mails that we left. They were happy that Roy Moore lost but they wanted to continue more with like the voting... trying to work on that. But some people were saying like in the beginning, you know, I thought you guys were, you know, exaggerating. I didn’t believe it was fascism. Now I’ve come to understand that this is fascism and it can’t be dealt with in normal ways. Some people were coming on and saying that ... and it’s been really good that like we’re depending on the phone bankers and on the volunteers to take really good notes. And the notes have been helping us a lot because I’m able to go back and you know, all right, this person was interested in the meeting, this person was an interesting conscience. A lot of these numbers, we just kind of collect them, and they add up. This was a really good opportunity not only to fundraise, but actually to engage with some people. That’s actually our goal this weekend as well, was to engage more in their thinking and take better notes and actually look at who are the ones that have a lot of prominence and want to take more of a role.
Accompanying this article is an interview with another person who did phone banking to raise money.
We encourage readers to donate to this fund drive, and to reach out to friends, family, and everyone you know. To quote, again, from the email from one of the Refuse Fascism supporters: “the louder our voices against these two monsters are, the stronger our chances are of kicking them the FUCK OUT!!!”
Interview about Phone Banking to Raise Money for Refuse Fascism
Revolution: Hi, Luna, this is Revolution newspaper. This Refuse Fascism fund drive has been pretty exciting, and we wanted to ask you a couple of questions to get a feel for what it’s been like doing phone banking, who’s contributing, why, what people are saying. So let’s start with what’s it been like doing phone banking?
Luna: It’s been pretty good. I have been telling people what this is about, and helping explaining to them a contribution is not just like donating to any other organization. I was really able to help them in a significant way, and when I did do phone banking, which was having conversations with people, and learning from what they were thinking and drawing them out. There was a lot of that. And then you would have conversations with people who could only give $10, and that was fine because you could still get a sense of what they were thinking. I learned a lot.
Revolution: Was there anything that struck you as interesting or unusual?
Luna: There was one woman who donated $100. She is a health care provider and she was telling me how her family was socialist from Italy, like when Mussolini was in power. I think that’s what she was talking about. So she was telling me about her family history and how her family really took a big part in fighting fascism in Italy and how she is a medical provider, and she was talking about how she can’t believe what they [the Trump/Pence regime]are doing with the health care thing. She couldn’t believe that this was happening, how they were changing things so rapidly and in the field of taking away people’s right to decent health care and stuff like that. She said she overheard two women before who were defending what Trump was doing and it’s really hard for her to wrap her head around that. She was telling me that and how she really can’t believe how people could defend someone like Trump who is doing all of these things. And she also talked about how they’re really going after intellectuals. She wanted to give as much as she can and, yeah, she was pretty cool.
There was a guy who gave $25. The first time he encountered Refuse Fascism was the full-page ad in the New York Times. I think he said he had donated already but he told me that the first time he wanted to help pay for that ad and pay for ads like that to get out there. Which I know was pretty significant. And as we talked, he’s kind of pessimistic about change, but then he has been reading The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, which is a book written by 27 psychiatrists. And then he was also explaining that there’s a real possibility Trump could be the last president ever in the United States, and how he doesn’t want that to be true. He was also talking about how “Make America Great Again” means “Make America White Again.” He was expanding on how Trump and the regime are actually worse than people think. He doesn’t think that people are actually really grappling with how bad this really is. That he’s not just some president, or a Republican, but he’s worse than most people think. But then [he was] thinking about their whole regime, and there was disagreement about Pence. Pence is not mentally ill like Trump is and he doesn’t have his finger on the nuclear trigger, so it would be kind of like Pence is not worse than Trump, you know kind of like that. And I was like, “No, Pence is worse, and Pence is part of this whole thing about consolidating Christian fascism in the United States. He was talking about how he has lost some friends over this. That fascism is alive and well in this country and it’s very scary. He did have an analogy that fascism has always been here. I said, “What do you mean by that? Do you mean...?” But he was talking about all of the corporations and how exploitation began before the start of or the beginning of the United States. And then he was talking about he used to do civil disobedience, like in the 1960s and stuff like that.
There was a woman... she didn’t donate... but she said she was gonna donate after she gets money. She was gonna donate $10. But she was kind of hesitant about donating, or being involved in Refuse Fascism at first because she kind of has a conception that we are only calling out the Republicans, but it is both parties that are taking part in making things worse, and how we’re not calling out the Democrats enough. That was one of her criticisms. Because she thinks it’s both parties. And because she also thought that [Hillary] Clinton was enabling a lot of these things. And that the Democrats are actually enabling fascism to consolidate. Which I thought was really important. And then I told her I was a revolutionary myself, and I agree with her. Look, I don’t think the Democrats are the answer. They’re not. And then I told her like the Democrats are leading us, or are leading people in the wrong direction, thinking that we can vote this out. And then she was like very excited, like “Yeah! We can’t get rid of Trump and Pence with this system, with these Democrats, they’re not gonna do anything.” She didn’t like Hillary Clinton. She was coming from a three-party perspective. And then how she thinks it’s gonna take people going outside the system, which I thought was very significant. She thinks we need to create a third party, a third political party. She thinks she could share with her friends what she was gonna donate and she was gonna donate $10 within the next week or something... when she had money.
There was another woman who was out in some part of California and can’t necessarily come out to things in Los Angeles. Yeah, she gave $20, that was as much as she could give. She told me she attended an outdoor rally and how she thinks Refuse Fascism is such a great organization. And that, like you know, she said Refuse Fascism is the closest thing she has found that identifies more the general conditions of the time that we are in, and that she majored in sociology, and she has really been thinking about this in a historical context. I asked what compelled her to come and donate, and contribute to this cause. And she kind of said potentially the idea of doing the most on the Earth while she is still here. She said I’m only on the Earth for a short amount of time and I need to be doing as much as possible... you know, she said the very Earth we live on takes care of us, so we need to take care of it. Like it’s not gonna be up to the universe [to take care of us], the universe could care less; you know, it’s really up to us. And she wanted to take more responsibility.
So there was a lot of that, there was a lot of people who are really like, like when I drew out their thinking, it was coming from all different kinds of perspective, which I really appreciated.
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