October 17

Dear American Opposition:

Something worth noticing is happening on October 17.

We will be in the streets that day for National Fucking Vote Day. So will Indivisible. So will 50501. So will the ACLU, the American Federation of Teachers, Black Voters Matter, MoveOn, Public Citizen, State Voices, and Voto Latino, under the banner of No Kings: Vote Early.

Different names. Different organizations. Different ways of talking.

The same country, on the same Saturday, doing the same thing.

Nobody had to be talked into it. There was no summit, no negotiated statement, no committee assigning territory. A dozen organizations looked at the same calendar and arrived independently at the same conclusion: We need to vote as we’ve never voted before.

That convergence is worth more than a coalition announcement. A coalition is a decision made in a room. This is a movement reaching the same judgment in a dozen rooms at once, which is what it looks like when people are reading reality accurately rather than reacting to each other.

To be clear: The regime doesn’t fear any one of these organizations individually. What they fear is alignment: Eight million plus people on one Saturday, arriving from a dozen directions with a dozen different reasons, is a problem you can’t manage, infiltrate, buy, nor decapitate.

It is also why the differences between us are a feature and not a flaw. Their events are nonpartisan and built to make voting easier for every eligible American. Ours is blunter, angrier, and has a word in the title that some will not repeat in front of their mothers.

Both are true. Both are needed. Some people are moved by a neighbor with a clipboard and a folding table. Some people are moved because they’re fucking angry and fed up with this bullshit.

A movement that can only speak in one register reaches one kind of person. We are not that, and October 17 is the proof.

So go to whichever one is closest to you. Ours, theirs, both. It doesn’t matter whose banner is over the table. It matters that you register, that you make your plan, that you vote early if your state allows it, and that you bring three people who were going to stay home and help them do it too.

This election is our last chance to turn the tide against fascism. If we lose this vote, we will lose our republic.

In honor of every sacrifice made across our history to deliver this nation to this moment, let’s stand up together and vote like our lives depend on it.

Because they do.

In solidarity,

Carlos Álvarez-Aranyos
Founder, American Opposition