TakeAction Minnesota Weekly Wrap [[link removed]]



Dear John,
What does it mean to honor MLK Day, when on the same day Donald Trump will be inaugurated as president?
Donald Trump, a man who represents everything Dr. King organized against.
Every year on MLK Day, the same people who perpetuate the injustices he fought against - poverty, racism, war - invoke his name as if they wouldn’t have labelled him a communist agitator.
They conveniently forget that his diagnosis of the cause of those injustices was capitalism.
They ignore his stance against war & imperialism.
They ignore his indictment of white supremacy.
They ignore his support for a federal jobs program, public housing, public education, and more.
They reduce Dr. King’s legacy to performative cheerleading of a superficial tolerance.
As bad as it feels watching MLK’s legacy get contorted out of shape by conservatives and moderates alike, there’s something uniquely awful about MLK Day marking the start of Trump’s second presidency.
While MLK fought for racial justice - justice, not just tolerance or acceptance - Trump has ushered in a new era of politically expedient and publicly acceptable white supremacy
While MLK fought against the excesses of capitalism, Trump IS an excess of capitalism. Even now, instead of a cabinet, he is building a cartel of corporate profiteers.
And while MLK viewed America as a community, calling for us to view ourselves as part of an “inescapable network of mutuality”, Trump and his billionaire buddies view us as resources to exploit.
Trump is not alone in any of these, but his last presidency was uniquely brazen and destructive, and his upcoming presidency threatens to be even moreso.
The only way to honor Dr. King’s legacy is to reject the sanitized, propagandized version of his work that seeks to render him harmless to the powerful.
MLK marched for civil rights, he fought for economic justice, he criticized American imperialism, and he called for the destruction of systems of oppression, things that would get him labelled as “woke nonsense” today.
Our North Star here at TakeAction Minnesota is rooted in the same diagnosis as Dr. King’s:
That there is more that connects us than divides,
That our government should invest in community resources, not guns and bombs and police.
And above all, that together we can move mountains.
That’s why we organize in teams: tenants for quality affordable housing, parents for universal childcare, students for better resourced schools, performers for investment in the arts.
We will not be silenced by Trump or watered down by moderates.
In solidarity,
Mattias Lehman (he/him)
Narrative and Communications Director



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