Speech on the Second Anniversary of Charlottesville

We've all been watching the news this past week. Are you mad? I’m mad. We have a president who says, “We’re on track for a million people rushing our borders… People hate the word invasion but that’s what it is.”

We have seen a coward, mind full of this poison walk into a store, point his weapon at latinx people, and spill the blood of the innocent. His manifesto said, “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”

Invasion? Texas was a part of Mexico until Mexico abolished slavery and the Texans got the hell out.

When people pointed out that this was the same language as the President and his crew uses, Fox News personality Brian Kilmeade said, “If you use the term an "invasion," that's not anti-Hispanic. It's a fact.”

I don’t think that’s a fact, do you?

An anonymous blogger defined a term back in 2011 that we need to understand. They wrote:

“Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable. In short, remote-control murder by lone wolf.”

The stochastic terrorist doesn’t need to pick up a gun or build a bomb. Their weapon is their ability to influence and inspire. They throw incendiary rhetoric into a volatile environment inhabited by extremists, fully understanding that it will inspire an act of terror. Trump, and his gang at Fox fit this description. During the 2016 campaign, Trump talked about “second amendment people” being the only ones who could “do something about” a problem. He understood what he was saying, who would hear it, and what it might inspire. And indeed, “second amendment people” have been extremely active in the years since. When Trump, or his propagandists at Fox, or any number of far right voices invoke “invasion” they’re doing something very specific. Likening the presence of latinx people in our communities to an invasion invokes the language of military aggression. This lie frames anything a terrorist might do to our precious latinx neighbors as an act of self-defense. I’m not afraid of the Guatemalan family next door, I’m afraid of an angry white coward with a gun!

The United States army invaded the Honduras seven times in the twentieth century to put down strikes and rebellions in order to keep the fruit companies in bananas! BANANAS! We overthrow democratically elected governments, fund and train far right militants who behead and crucify people, and install brutal dictatorships. The only country in Latin America that has never known the presence of the U.S. military is French Guyana. We have ravaged the region and when people flee the legacy of our aggression and ask us for mercy, what do we do? We cage them, separate their families, leave their beautiful children alone and crying. We tell them to drink out of toilets. The people we’re treating so barbarically are not invaders, they’re the invaded!

And what does Nancy Pelosi say about the man who’s directing this brutality, and feeding the beast of white terror? That doing her constitutional duty and impeaching the man is simply not worth it.

When I see children crying and terrified because their parents have been swept away, I cannot conceive being able to believe that doing anything to stop these crimes isn’t worth it. The blood in El Paso and the misery in our camps are upon her head too.

Willem van Spronsen, who died while sabotaging ICE vehicles wrote in his farewell letter that “you don’t have to burn the mother___er down, but are you just gonna stand by?”

It is understandable to be afraid. We know Pelosi doesn't want to do anything, and we know Trump is just warming up. But we have a weapon with which to fight. We have each other.

When the people…. You and I... stand as one, wealth and power trembles.

We came here to fight, and we will fight until the camps are empty and we know justice and mercy in this land.

Solidarity!