WASHINGTON—In some of his sharpest language yet against the Trump regime—and its congressional and MAGA followers, too—Bishop and Rev. William Barber II is challenging the country by answering, “What do we do when democracy is hijacked?”
Joined by other ministers, victims of Trump’s policies, and Samuel Epps, President of the Metropolitan Washington Central Labor Council, Rev. Barber launched into a fiery speech just a block from the White House on May 11, before leading a group of volunteers to sit down on the sidewalk in front of the Executive Mansion to be arrested in a show of peaceful civil disobedience.
There was, as usual, no immediate reaction from Trump. D.C. police monitored the rally, but kept a low profile. And Rev. Barber vowed, “We will be back.”
Trump’s troops—National Guards from red states and ICE agents who have been dragooning, beating, arresting, and deporting people—were nowhere to be seen.
Rev. Barber answered his own question by quoting sections of the Declaration of Independence.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men—it should now be ‘all people’—are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
“That to preserve these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. But whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and institute new forms of government.”
And the way to accomplish that goal is to flood the polls this fall with record numbers of voters demanding a change in government and a change in policies emanating from D.C., Rev. Barber and other speakers said.
After all, he pointed out, in the last election, the number of registered voters who did not vote—90 million—exceeded the vote totals of both Republican nominee Donald Trump and his Democratic foe, Vice President Kamala Harris. Rev. Barber did not name either.
“It is not just my right to vote. It is my duty,” Rev. Barber declared. “Whenever there is a long train of abuses, it is time to turn this nation around.”
“Over and over, people have come to this place to change democracy. This is hard work,” he added.
Rev. Barber unveiled a list of goals the foes of authoritarians and supporters of “the tradition of non-violence, peace and justice,” should stand for.
“We say NO to denying peace, but choosing an unholy war of choice in Iran,” he declared. To “denying voting rights, denying living wages, denying health care, denying freedom from poverty, denying labor rights, denying statehood to citizens of Washington, D.C., denying rights to indigenous people, denying climate change, denying gender rights.”
The May 11 event Rev. Barber hosted was livestreamed on YouTube, and Repairers of the Breach—the parent organization of his New Poor People’s Campaign—organized similar events and had members lobby lawmakers in various states from coast to coast.
“What do we do when democracy is hijacked? This is the question we face. This is why we got to get real serious,” Rev. Barber said.
The rally and speeches were the latest Moral Monday event in D.C., and Rev. Barber promised to sponsor more every Monday until the nation wakes up and demands an end to “the U.S.-Israel illegal and immoral” Iran War abroad. “It is a war of aggression,” he said.
Rev. Barber did not let the rest of the nation off the hook by putting all the blame on Trump. He described “a social schizophrenia” in the U.S. “that has been with us since the nation was born.”
Trump, his followers, his congressional allies, and his MAGA legions are just the latest symptoms of that longtime national ailment, he said.
“But every so often it goes real crazy,” he added.
That’s manifested “in the man who occupies the White House, in a Congress that treats him as a demigod” and an Executive Branch uncontained by legal or moral guardrails.
The result is Trump and the forces behind him “think America was right to begin with” in 1776, when only propertied white men, most of them Christian Protestants, took control of the nation.
And for that caste, “everything since then has been downhill,” he said, referring to the steady expansion of voting rights, civil rights, and workers’ rights, first to landless white men, then to African-American men, then women, then workers, and then finally people 18 and over.
And much of the U.S. elite is complicit with that elite, Bishop Rev. Barber warned, especially in spending on Trump’s war on Iran. “We have paid for the genocide” Israel is perpetrating in Gaza, he said. He stated that $28 billion in U.S. military aid and weaponry accounts for 40% of Israel’s defense budget.
“Shame on us and shame on Israel for starting this war together.”
To preserve their power and their influence, the original oppressors—those white property owners, now the 1%, including Trump—are now MAGA “waging a war that is mean, a war that is angry, a war that is greedy and a war that is anti-American.”
The other speakers, most of them religious leaders, were given two minutes each and asked to speak on specific topics. They ranged from the Trump wars on Venezuela, Iran, and the Palestinians, to his ICE troops and their war on migrants.
Others targeted the Supreme Court’s eradication of the remnants of the Voting Rights Act—as did Rev. Barber—and Trump’s abolition of measures to combat climate change.
Trump’s ICE agents “are coming after people who don’t look like me,” one white pastor said in denouncing Trump’s troops in U.S. cities, notably D.C. itself.
Trump, meanwhile, mused in a White House meeting with reporters about annexing Venezuela as the 51st state, primarily for its oil reserves.
Epps, the Metro D.C. Central Labor Council president, particularly slammed Trump’s racism towards anyone who’s a person of color, especially those of Hispanic descent. Trump has withdrawn some of his vicious and violent ICE and Border Patrol agents from other cities he sent them to occupy, such as Los Angeles and Chicago.
But not D.C.
“We are talking about policy violence when the people who grow our food, who pave our roads, and who care for our children are told they are not worth a living wage,” he said. Other speakers on the repression of migrants pointed out that Trump wants to expel them all.
“We say ‘no’ to an economy that acquires wealth,” that condones union-busting, and that dumps voting rights. We say ‘yes’ to an “economy where it is built from the bottom up, and where persons who make the least deserve the most.”
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