Hi friend, 

Are you following Pete on Substack?

If not, we invite you to read his latest post. It speaks to something fundamental about who we are as a country – and what’s at stake when leaders treat our own communities like battlegrounds. Here’s a preview:

“Uniformed troops are being deployed to communities whose leaders have made clear they are not needed - putting these service members in a terrible situation. To be clear, this has nothing to do with being able to quickly respond to legitimately dangerous situations. (For the administration's true priorities on emergency response, look no further than Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s decision earlier this year to sit for 72 hours on urgent requests for help with Texas flooding, while search and rescue teams waited for her to finally authorize them to deploy and save lives.) If anything, this is intended to increase tension and potentially violence on the ground, turning ordinary protests into dangerous confrontations that can then be exploited after the fact to justify even more militarization. Nor is this really about crime - indeed, the same local law enforcement agencies that have driven crime down over the years in these cities could do even more if given even a fraction of the massive cost of these deployments to work with locally. 

Worst of all, the President has repeatedly referred to Americans - not foreign adversaries, but Americans who criticize him - as “the enemy” and even as “vermin,” sending the message that he is more interested in crushing those who dare to oppose him politically than the actual enemy that our military trains to confront. 

These actions have been so unrelenting and are executed with such faux confidence by Trump and his appointees that it would be easy to miss the simple and extremely important fact that Americans aren’t falling for it. A strong majority of the American people disapprove of these actions, knowing they do not make us safer and recognizing that the politicization of the military, and the militarization of policing, makes everyone worse off.“

You can read Pete’s full post by clicking here: 

Pete has been using every platform available to him – social media like Facebook, Instagram, X and TikTok, podcasts, in-person events, these emails, and Substack – to draw attention to the most urgent issues of the moment. 

He’s going everywhere to reach as many people as possible and have conversations about our country, our future, and our shared values. Thank you for reading and engaging with his message across all of his platforms. 

Team Pete