Folks – American students across the country are standing up and demanding an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In response, corrupt university administrators are swarming the students with police in riot gear, staging snipers on the roofs overlooking the demonstrators, and violently assaulting students and their allies.

Thousands have been arrested – including me, last month in St. Louis – for exercising our right to dissent and peaceably assemble.

Now multiple lawmakers and university officials are calling for the National Guard to be sent in.

As a lifelong anti-war activist, I’ve partnered with Win Without War and other like-minded groups to send a clear and urgent message to the White House: The right to protest is sacrosanct. We cannot allow National Guard troops on campus. Will you add your name alongside mine?

Violent police crackdowns aren’t making students on any campus safer. I can attest to that firsthand. Sending in armed troops will only increase tensions – and the likelihood of an irreversible tragedy.

We don’t have to guess what that looks like because we already know: At Kent State on May 4, 1970, 28 National Guard soldiers fired into a crowd of thousands protesting the Vietnam War. They killed four students and wounded nine others.

Those protests are no different from the ones we are seeing today. From Columbia to the University of Texas-Austin to the University of California, Berkeley, and back again, young people across the country are exercising their constitutionally protected rights to free speech and assembly to protest horrific violence in Gaza.

As the protests spread, Republican governors can act (and already have acted) unilaterally.

That’s why your voice is urgently needed today: Will you add your name and help us send the president a clear and crucial reminder that dissent is not a crime, and protest is patriotic?

There is a moral vacuum in our political system right now. These students have stepped up to fill it, and I stand unequivocally with them.

In solidarity,

Jason