PETER WINDREM’S OPENING REMARKS TO INDIVISIBLE LAKE COUNTY CA MEET UP KELSEYVILLE EVENT CENTER --- AUGUST 20, 2025
Dear Friends,
The mission of Indivisible is to defeat the Trump agenda, elect progressive leaders, and rebuild our democracy.
We gather this evening to help accomplish that mission. We join over 2,400 other Indivisible Groups doing the same.
Over the 60 years before President Trump, we progressives fought and won battles for civil rights, voting rights, women’s rights, expanded health care, environmental protection laws, LBGTQ rights, and more. We promoted the spread of democracy at home and around the world.
We now face a fascist counter-revolution determined to destroy every one of those advances. This counter-revolution is founded on the fascist belief that only wealthy white men should rule because they are inherently superior people, and that our government should be led by a single, powerful leader with absolute authority. Those beliefs have taken over the Republican Party, the Presidency and Congress.
In furtherance of their fascist agenda, the President, his minions, and Congress have committed these wrongs and more:
- Cut funds for health care for the poor and elderly, for medical research, and for Social Security and Medicare
- Attacked public education, destroyed the Department of Education, banned books, and promoted religion in the classroom
- Reversed environmental policies adopted for secure clean air and water, to address climate change, and to reduce the use of fossil fuels
- Given tax breaks to the wealthy and enacted tariffs that act as a tax on consumers
- Demonized immigrants who come as asylum seekers
- Formed an ICE police force to act as a private militia under the exclusive control of the President
- Undermined voting rights with gerrymandering and false claims of voter fraud
- Ignored the rule of law, the Constitution, the courts and due process
- And more.
To achieve our Indivisible mission will not be quick or easy. We face forces that do not hesitate to lie, bully and cheat to retain their power.
But we do know that we are on the side of truth and justice and democracy, and that we will win, and that we will have fun while doing so. In the words of the best sign at the recent protest in Lakeport, we will “Make Lying Wrong Again.”
Finally, we do our work, as President Lincoln told us in his Gettysburg Address, so that “. . . . this nation shall have a new birth of freedom --- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Peter Windrem