Randy Blazak's Speech (English Transcript):

Hello good people, people who know that the resistance is here!

My name is Randall Blazak and I am a sociologist who has studied fascism for over 40 years. As part of my doctoral dissertation, I went undercover in the white supremacist movement, interviewing neo-Nazis from San Francisco to Berlin, learning how they organize. Since then I have been building the resistance to white supremacy, from my classrooms to my role as the chair of Oregon’s Coalition Against Hate Crimes.

As a scholar of authoritarianism, I beg you to believe me that fascism isn’t coming to America, it is here. It crept in slowly while we were distracted by TikTok and K-Pop. Ninety years ago, at each attack on freedom in Germany, Germans thought, well, it can’t get any worse than this. Then it did.

But, to paraphrase Monty Python, freedom is not dead yet. We are all here because we believe there is still time to derail MAGA’s assault on our democracy. I bring you two important strategies.

First, we must build uncomfortable coalitions. The success of Polish labor union leader Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement in 1980 was that it wasn’t just a union movement, it was a broad coalition of union members, students, intellectuals, feminists, journalists, and the Catholic Church. And in doing so, they brought down a totalitarian regime.

We must break out of our silos and our rigid dogmas, and find common ground, because the fate of our very nation depends on it. And that will include some unlikely alliances, including anarchists and conservative Democrats, environmentalists and the business community. And yes, Palestinian rights activists and Zionists. We will stand by the things that divide us, but, for the sake of our very survival, we must stand for what unites us.

And to make this even more spicy, we’re going to need to lasso some MAGAs. As tariffs and budget cuts spread the misery, we can peel away disaffected Trump voters and we’ll need to bring them on board and put them to work, guided by love and not retribution. Retribution is Trump’s trip, not ours.

Secondly, we have to build community capacity. We must put down our screens and get to know our neighbors. We are in a crisis of loneliness because we don’t engage in our communities anymore. After WW2, Hannah Arendt wrote, “What prepares people for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience, has become an everyday experience.”

Our strongest weapon against fascism is community engagement. Please take a second to say hello to the people around you. We are in this fight together.

Building community capacity will allow us to push ICE out of our neighborhoods and support each other when things get bad and they will get bad. Build those relationships now.

In closing, I’d like to share one thing I learned from Joe Strummer, leader of The Clash - The future is unwritten.

Welcome to the resistance!