Seems just like the kind of people I would want my family and friends to live around.
The ad greeted New York Times readers on page five, not far from stories about an ISIS-inspired terror attack that left eight people dead in New York City’s financial sector. In stark black and white, it proclaimed: “The TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO! NOV 4. It Begins. BE THERE. JOIN WITH THE THOUSANDS. RefuseFascism.org.”
"Refuse fascism," a nascent protest group with ties to a more explicitly left-wing radical group, "the revolutionary communist party," doesn’t seem like a typical fit for the left-leaning pages of the paper known as The Gray Lady, but very little has been normal about the Trump era so far, according to organizers. The regime is destroying the planet by ignoring climate change, they say, and they claim it is turning America into a fascist country through an unprecedented series of executive orders.
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The explicit goal of the November 4 protests, which have been warped into a number of increasingly bizarre, "antifa"-related conspiracy theories by right-wing media, is to remove Trump and his administration from office. In order to achieve that end, millions of people will have to take to the streets of cities like New York, Austin and San Francisco, demanding that the administration step down, organizers tell Newsweek. It’s something that will not be achieved with the actions of only a few left-wing radicals, they say.
“What Trump and his administration are doing could pose an existential threat to humanity,” Andy Zee, a member of the advisory board for refuse fascism, told Newsweek in a phone interview, echoing comments made by leftist academic Noam Chomsky and others regarding the alleged dangers of the contemporary Republican Party. “We’re in one of the most perilous moments in history right now.”
Zee said he thinks that the more moderate, Thomas Friedman-reading consumers of the Times will respond to his concerns, and that a coalition can be built between people with different political views who simply want to see Trump removed from office as soon as possible. "Antifa," after all, means "anti-fascist," and that's a belief that most Americans share, he said.
So far, the rallies, which are scheduled in cities throughout the country, appear to be gaining the most popularity in liberal hubs like New York and San Francisco, according to Facebook events pages. As of Thursday afternoon, close to a thousand people had explicitly signed up to go to the New York rally, and a little less than 5,000 people had expressed an interest in attending the event without fully committing to going.
