The following is the prepared text of a speech delivered at a July 17 rally organized by the Democratic Socialists of America in response to Rush Hospital’s decision to halt gender-affirming care for trans youth. The move, following similar actions by Lurie Children’s Hospital, signals a disturbing trend of Illinois institutions preemptively complying with the Trump administration’s attacks on trans healthcare. Published here with the speaker’s permission.

Hi everyone, my name is Lyra Spencer she/her, and I am the co-chair of the Chicago Chapter of the Democratic Socialist of America. 

I want to first start out by thanking everyone for being here today, including the various organizations that endorsed this event such as the Chicago Teachers Union, the Illinois Nursing Association, Howard Brown Healthcare Workers United, the Gay Liberation Network, the Party of Socialism and Liberation, Socialist Alternative, Illinois Nurses Association, Howard Brown Health Workers United and several IPOs.

Comrades, I wish we were all gathered here under better circumstances. I stand before you today because Rush Medical systems have caved to the pressures of the Trump administration, and have halted accepting new minor patients for gender affirming care. This comes off the heels of Lurie’s Children’s hospital, headed by CEO Tom Shanley, ceasing all gender affirming care for minors. The consequences of these two hospital systems’ actions means that children who need access to life saving treatment will have less options and likely longer waits to receive this life saving treatment. There are now fewer places available in Chicago that provide this life saving care, burdening the rest of the system in Chicago, and ultimately making it more difficult for all trans people to receive the care we so desperately need.

Now how did this happen? We are in Chicago, Illinois of all places. A trans sanctuary city. Is there a law in place that prevents these hospital systems from providing care to all trans youth? In short, no. Earlier this year the Trump administration signed an executive order attempting to ban gender affirming care for those under 19. Almost immediately after that order was signed it was challenged and halted in the courts. Even though this executive order is not law, just this order being proposed was enough for Lurie Children’s to immediately suspend all gender affirming care. Rush followed caving in fear of their medicaid funding being taken away. The reason why these are both so dangerous outside of directly harming some of the most vulnerable children in our society, is because fascism relies on compliance. The more we preemptively comply with fascists, the more we try to conceal ourselves, the more we hide and stray away from confrontation the more power we give them. With that power they become stronger and have an even greater ability to hurt us, our communities, and to bring harm amongst those we care the most about. 

Well comrades it is beyond time that we say enough. It’s time to mobilize, organize, and to unionize. It is time to join organizations like DSA, or the many orgs that are here today. The capitalist Democrats aren’t going to do this for us. The attorney general and Pritzker are letting this all unfold under their watch. No one is coming to save us, so it’s time that we take our liberation into our own hands and fight back against this fascist regime. That means using allies in the state and passing Alderwoman Fuentes’ resolution, which we helped draft to condemn these hospital systems. That also means taking to the streets, like what we are doing right now, to apply direct pressure to these systems. I have to add that this is not a fight we can take on our own, but must be waged through collective struggle. We need to be in organization with our communities and our coworkers in order to resist fascism. Our power lies in working class people standing together and organizing for change. Our power does not come from lawyers nor the good graces of private hospital administrators.

Comrades, the issues we are experiencing today are a direct result of the failures of capitalism. Fascism tries to redirect those failures towards an out group, rather than where it should be which is at the ruling class. It is no surprise that life saving gender affirming care was first limited by two hospital systems that are privately owned and that are non-unionized. This shows the absurdity of healthcare being treated as a commodity and a vessel for private owners to profit from. We must go beyond being on the defense and demand not only that access to life saving gender affirming care be legal and protected for anyone of all ages, but we must also demand that both gender affirming care and all healthcare must be made free at the point of service. It is beyond time that the Illinois government treats healthcare broadly as a human right and makes sure that all of its residents have quality, free healthcare.

Another point I want to touch on is that us trans people are not the only scapegoat of this fascist regime. As we speak, our neighbors are being ripped away from their families and shuttled off to modern day concentration camps. They have gotten so inhumane that they wait till church services, birthday parties, graduations, to tear apart these families and to leave children scared and confused. Whether it’s denying children access to life saving gender affirming care, ripping apart migrant families and leaving children traumatized and orphaned, or slaughtering children indiscriminately in Gaza, this administration has launched an assault on our most vulnerable youth. We need to stand side by side, shoulder to shoulder in solidarity with every group this administration tries to other. These isolation tactics will not succeed because we all deeply understand the sentiment MLK shared which was “an injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere.”

Lastly, I will leave everyone with this. My family is from rural Mississippi and my father, if he were alive, would be 79 years old this year. He had to drink from “colored” only drinking fountains. My aunts could not use the bathrooms of their choosing and had to use “colored” women’s facilities. Sound familiar? This struggle for civil rights has not gone away and those here who are standing up for trans rights are the successors to that movement, and our cause today is as just as the cause of my father’s generation. Never let anyone who would disparage working class organizing and mobilizing tell you that they would’ve marched with Doctor King, because if that were true they’d be right here today.

In closing we have a lot of work today folks, but we will emerge victorious. We will beat back fascism, guarantee healthcare for all, and Chicago will become the beacon for joint trans and working class power in the United States. That starts today by joining DSA or one of the many amazing orgs that cosponsored this event. 

The post Defend Trans Kids! appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

With the passage of the so-called “big beautiful bill,” the poorest of the poor are being told their shelters are no longer funded, their food pantries won’t take them anymore, and their chronic illnesses will lock them into six-digit debts. All the while, one of the same bill’s provisions allows businesses to deduct the full costs of private jets. This type of prioritization is social murder, and we need to think beyond the corporate media and NGOs to build structures that can fight for the future we can – and need – to win.

As union workers in SEIU protested on the Senate lawn to declare, “these cuts kill.” While NOAA’s proposed 2026 budget closes all federally funded weather and climate research labs, the government’s Earth-destroying military budget is set to exceed $1 trillion. Over 130 people in Texas are dead after experienced National Weather Service staffers were offered severance, and the local government rejected flood warning systems due to cost. Social murder is a term coined by Friedrich Engels to describe the deliberate societal forces that bring about a “murder against which none can defend themselves.” Did these Texans die, or were they socially murdered? When a politician signs a paper forbidding a woman from receiving life-saving medical treatment, is it a passive act of someone dying, or is it violent act of someone killing? This bill is not an outlier. It is a crescendo of the austerity politics that have been cutting off community life supports for decades. We cannot allow any spectrum of debate to include costing out that which kills by omission; we can not cost out the lives of our neighbors, coworkers, or families.

Just a handful of private, multi-billion-dollar conglomerates own 90% of all US federal, state, and local media networks. Due to this, all widely broadcast discussions are framed with an unquestioning loyalty to the root narratives behind these highly-profitable social murder policies. Lively debates are held on just what degree people should have to prove their societal worth to allow them access to a doctor. The imposed scarcity framing this conversation is never questioned. Neither Fox News nor CNN, however, speak of scarcity when this same bill pushes nearly eight times the “saved costs” from food access into militarization. Over a trillion of our dollars will be spent every year imposing mass starvation and death upon all the world’s people this US government declares our enemies. Yet, when this same bill makes our incarceration and deportation machine the third-best funded army on the planet, it is seen as “unprecedented.” In the name of “non-partisanship” and “neutrality,” the corporate media’s coverage builds the public consent for our congresspeople to socially murder tens of thousands of Americans. We cannot let the ruling class define the field in which we fight. We have to meet people where they’re at, but we must do so with organizational media that is unafraid to educate, raise expectations, and make demands.

How did you resist the bill likely to be Trump’s longest lasting impact? More of us than ever before called our senators and marched through our cities. However, with the primary cost imposition being withheld votes and bad press, we can’t leave our struggles behind on the streets. Union density and participation is low, and there are no large scale political parties accountable to the working class and marginalized peoples. The only big institutions our angry public has for our defense are NGOs and nonprofits. These institutions are kept separate along the lines of their single issues, and are not accountable to their members. They’re accountable to donors and philanthropists – themselves unaccountable to a strategy. A nonprofit only has the power to ask you or me to call up a politician and tell their office worker what we think. This is not empowering. Much like a demonstration in the public square, it functions as an appeal to power. The capitalist state, purposed on reproducing itself, defines a democracy such that corporations are people and money is speech. The upper echelons of the political class are loyal to the “speech” that makes each of them more wealthy than you or I will ever be. A withheld vote or day of bad press will never speak as loudly as withheld labor and economic leverage. Actions like a strike or a widespread, disciplined, and targeted boycott take vast, connected structures of accountability. For a long term, winning movement, these are the structures we need.

Communities are weaker than ever. We are torn apart every day by the social murder committed by neoliberal policies – incarcerations, evictions, and social service destruction. These crises are amplified exposures of the everyday, not ruptures from the norm. Without an organized and structured community, all we have is the hope that someone else will do something. It will not save us to have awareness, prayers, and praise for the “resilience” of those who endure once the hurt hits close to home. We need to unite and strengthen the few remaining representational organizations like labor unions. Where there are missing structures that could unite people across currently isolated struggles, we need to create them. Tenants unions, students unions, and debtors unions alike can be built and scaled up across decades. These are the institutions we must join into, struggle with, and lead to form a shared horizon for those whom there is not yet a place to be represented. You can’t create a government truly accountable to the people unless the people have unifying structures that exist to empower them. Only when line cooks, tenants, retirees, students, and all those in between are comfortable leveraging their power and solidarity can we create a new society truly beholden to the people.

The post Trump’s Social Murder Bill Passes – Now What? appeared first on Pine & Roses.

Enjoy your July National Political Committee (NPC) newsletter! Our NPC is an elected 18-person body (including two YDSA members who share a vote) which functions as the board of directors of DSA. This month, help stop deportation flights, check out Convention updates, and more!

And to make sure you get our newsletters in your inbox, sign up here! Each one features action alerts, upcoming events, political education, and more.

• From the National Political Committee — A Red Hot Socialist Summer!
• No Flights for Abductions! Take Action Today
• Convention Update — Solidarity Journal Deadline Tonight, Friday 7/18
• Nominations for World to Win Fellowship Close Tonight, Friday 7/18
• Join us Sunday 7/20 to Learn How to Run a Membership Drive in Your Chapter!
• Monday 7/21 — RSVP for Lessons from the Zohran Campaign and Next Steps for our Electoral Work

From the National Political Committee — A Red Hot Socialist Summer!

As we come up on DSA’s 2025 Convention, we see our members wrangling with big questions of democracy and grappling with analysis of our campaigns and strategies. But we know for sure that whatever our delegates decide, we’ll come out of Convention energized and ready to turn words into action.

And while our delegates focus on Convention this summer, so much organizing is going strong all over the country! DSA chapters from coast to coast are hitting the hot pavement this summer to fight for labor rights, electoral victories, the right to dignified housing, broad protections for immigrants and trans folks, an end to imperialist violence, and so much more. 

We just saw a massive win as NYC-DSA took on the rotten establishment and propelled democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani to victory in the Democratic mayoral primary in the wealthiest city in the world! We invite you to join us, our National Electoral Commission, NYC-DSA’s co-chairs, and other folks from the Zohran campaign to a debrief call on Monday night at 8pm ET/7pm CT/6pm MT/5pm PT. Let’s dig into the nitty-gritty of the campaign together: what can we learn about the vigorous comms strategy or the robust field game, and how can we replicate that work and turn those lessons toward electoral work and other campaigns elsewhere in the country? And how can we, as DSA members, support the other insurgent candidates who are running races in Tacoma, Detroit, Somerville, and more? Join us and find out! 

There is so much to learn about and analyze from this incredible campaign, and a lot comes down to the DSA Difference. Zohran’s development as a political organizer came through DSA, and his historic win continues to help us build our organization, as he showed at a recent volunteer appreciation day where he recruited NYC DSA’s 10,000th member! Zohran’s campaign focused on cost of living, and also had internationalism deeply baked in, demonstrating that our causes cannot be separated. To bring together the working class against relentless ruling class attempts to keep us divided, a laser focus on economic demands and cost of living can work closely with standing up strong against injustice around the world. His long-time and open defense of a Free Palestine, against vicious attacks from the establishment, energized so many voters that stuffed-shirt consultants have ignored and badly discounted, and even increased credibility that his campaign is prepared to deliver here at home. 

It’s our active, focused organizing on the outside that makes it possible for our electeds to stand strong on principles. The coalition fueling Zohran had long been demonstrating on the streets, in our workplaces, and base-building in our communities to show we share goals across all kinds of differences to transform our society. Our DSA chapters are out there fighting for universal economic demands, just as we are fighting for Palestinian rights, demanding an immediate end to Israel’s aggression against Iran, taking on BDS targets like Chevron and Maersk, fighting for the rights of immigrants to be safe in our workplaces and our communities, and recognizing that immigrants must be protected both within the US and from the conditions that make people economic refugees in the first place. 

And it’s happening across the org! Humboldt DSA and Salem DSA both took up our Boycott Avelo campaign, pushing back against this airline’s willingness to take ICE contracts and deport our neighbors. These chapters saw big wins this month, with the City of Eureka, California ending its Avelo contracts and Salem, Oregon seeing Avelo pull out of their airport completely under pressure to have the City of Salem end their contracts. You can find out more about these victories and how your chapter can be next on our Boycott Avelo call Tuesday 7/22 at 8pm ET/7pm CT/6pm MT/5pm PT!

DSA has also signed on nationally to the National Iranian American Council’s No War With Iran campaign and Progressive International’s Block Baerbock Campaign against the UN’s warmongering new President of the General Assembly, Annalena Baerbock. We encourage you to sign onto these petitions and keep an eye out for new ways to get involved.

We hope you’re taking a little bit of time this summer to sit by some water, take a nice walk somewhere green, or kick back by the grill with some folks you love. We are fighting enormous, world-historic fights, and remembering what exactly we’re fighting for is so important. We’ll see you on the picket line, at the rally, or in a lawn chair by the lake sometime soon!

In Solidarity,

Megan Romer and Ashik Siddique
DSA National Co-Chairs

No Flights for Abductions! Take Action Today

DSA chapters have officially joined the national call to boycott Avelo Airlines, who announced a $150 million contract in April to fly deportation flights for ICE out of Arizona. We even had our first DSA win in Eureka this week, where Humboldt DSA members bravely spoke in front of city council to call for an end to subsidies for Avelo, and city council agreed to boycott the airline! 

This is only the beginning. For the next several months, we will push Avelo to drop its horrific contract with ICE, and we won’t stop until we win. Join us! 

• Take action now! Send 40 letters in one click to top Avelo leadership and their allies.
• And sign up here to get involved as a chapter.

Convention Update — Solidarity Journal Deadline Tonight, Friday 7/18

Say hi to comrades in the Convention Solidarity Journal! The deadline to purchase an ad and submit your artwork is tonight, Friday 7/18, at midnight Pacific Time. The Solidarity Journal will be distributed to all Convention attendees and shared online. You, your chapter, working group, or committee can place an ad in the Solidarity Journal to send a message of solidarity or of celebration to your chapter, work, or comrades.

Please note that Solidarity Journal messages advocating for or against any convention proposal, NPC candidate, slate, or DSA caucus will not be accepted. Journal space is available in three sizes, plus text-only solidarity messages. Ads should be sent as PNG, JPG, or TIFF files, color or black and white. You can find more details and buy your ad here.

Nominations for World to Win Fellowship Close Tonight, Friday 7/18

A World To Win fellowship nominations close tonight, Friday 7/18 at midnight! DSA Fund’s A World To Win fellowship is for organizers doing groundbreaking work to bring new communities into the movement for democratic socialism. Fellows will receive a $5,000 award, a set of virtual workshops with democratic socialist luminaries, and opportunities to share their work with comrades across the country. Don’t wait, nominate someone today!

Join us Sunday 7/20 to Learn How to Run a Membership Drive in Your Chapter!

As DSA is getting a bunch of publicity from the Zohran campaign in NYC, many chapters are getting a bump in membership. And in the lead up to the general election, chapters can use that publicity to re-engage their membership lists and recruit new members. Join the Growth and Development Committee Sunday 7/20 at 2pm ET/1pm CT/12pm MT/11am PT for a training to teach chapter leaders how to do that!

Monday 7/21 — RSVP for Lessons from the Zohran Campaign and Next Steps for our Electoral Work

Join the National Electoral Commission, our national co-chairs Megan Romer and Ashik Siddique, and NYC-DSA co-chairs Grace and Gustavo to discuss Zohran’s historic campaign from behind the scenes!

PLUS hear from DSA endorsed candidates across the country on our record-breaking fundraising campaign and how you can get involved. The call is on Monday 7/21 at 8pm ET/7pm CT/6pm MT/5pm PT. RSVP today!

The post Your National Political Committee Newsletter — A Red Hot Socialist Summer! appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

On July 11th, LVDSA Co-Chair Shaun Navarro asked Las Vegas Mayor Shelley Berkley a simple question: will you pledge not to collaborate with ICE?

Her answer: “No.”

This answer is unacceptable when our community is living in fear.

We call on Mayor Berkley and the Las Vegas City Council to publicly commit that the city of Las Vegas:

• will not collaborate or enter into an agreement with ICE
• will refuse the use of city resources for ICE transfer or holds
• will take a definitive stand to ensure Las Vegas remains safe for all residents, irrespective of their immigration status

Mayor Berkley also asserted “there is no ICE in Las Vegas”. While this is technically true, it is wildly misleading about the fact that ICE presence is growing in the valley: ICE has a detention center in Henderson, ICE activity has caused Broadacres Market in North Las Vegas to shut down, and ICE detained TikTok star Khaby Lame at Harry Reid International Airport in Clark County’s jurisdiction.

Mayor Berkley called ICE’s activity an “unfortunate situation”. But on July 1st, she also said that she supported Sheriff McMahill’s decision for LVMPD to coordinate with ICE under the federal 287(g) program. This program deputizes local law enforcement to fulfill federal immigration duties, allows LVMPD to detain undocumented people for up to two days to transfer them to ICE custody, and requires LVMPD to report conversations regarding citizenship to ICE within one hour.

While the city doesn’t control LVMPD, they work closely together and the city will be giving them over $185 million over the next year – funding a force that is working directly with ICE.

We believe that families being ripped apart is more than an “unfortunate situation”. Our community is afraid and wants to know that they will be safe and that their elected officials will not collaborate with ICE, which is why Shaun Navarro was met with applause as he asked the Mayor “When they are separating our families, what will you do?”

We invite members of the community to visit lvdsa.org/no-ice to send a letter to the Mayor and City Council with these demands and to join us in the fight to Cancel the ICE Contracts.

Are you fed up with rising rents, low wages, climate inaction, and billionaires hoarding more while we struggle with less? You’re not alone — and you’re not powerless.

We would like to invite you in learning about Democratic Socialism to our Mass Intro event that we are holding on July 27th at the DAAC! Our chapter has existed since 2017 and among other things, we have focused on issues including Labor, Housing, Trans rights, the Environment, Medicare for All, and fighting for the working class in general. 

We will have tacos, speakers, and music that we can all sing along to. Come celebrate Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City Mayor’s Democratic Primary and help build our own Socialist movement in West Michigan.

This event is perfect for:
✅ Newcomers curious about what democratic socialism really means
✅ Anyone ready to get involved in building a better, more just world
✅ Existing members looking to reconnect or bring a friend

Together we can create a better world for all of us if we all work towards building our chapter and collaborating on future projects and events.

Solidarity!

The post Fight Fascism/Build Socialism: Intro to the GRDSA appeared first on Grand Rapids Democratic Socialists of America.

Americans are taught to venerate July 4th as a turning point not only in the history of the Americas, but in human history itself. It supposedly represents the founding of the first modern republic, a nation destined to lead the world into an unparalleled golden age of freedom.

At one time, celebrations of the Fourth of July also included some celebration of universal rights. These include the idea that the United States is defined by its constitution, that there are some things that the government shouldn’t be allowed to do, and that every person is entitled to basic rights under the law. It also included the idea that democratic governance is a good in itself, applicable not only to those living within the borders of the United States, but of everyone in the world yearning to breathe free.

Next year, America will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The celebrations will be overseen by Donald Trump, the single most selfish, myopic, and authoritarian man ever to hold the office of President of the United States. They will take place in the context of his active attempts to destroy American democracy and remake it in his own image.

To the degree that the United States was ever a ‘revolutionary’ republic, that promise is now a distant memory. Any pretext of universalism that one existed (in spite of the many serious flaws of the American experiment) is gone. Republicans have replaced it with a ‘blood and soil’ conception of what it means to be an American, and Democrats are so preoccupied with civility politics that they abandoned the question of what it means to be an American decades ago.

The Independence Day holiday is still inexorably tied to the existence of the United States of America as a nation-state, and to the current policies of its leadership. Furthermore, it can never be extricated from the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade and indigenous genocide, which loom large over any founding myth of the United States. The national founding holiday of the United States of America will never be a day celebrating universal human freedom. That is why, as socialists, we must look to other inspirations for our struggle.

***

Three centuries ago, the European concept of a ‘state’ was inextricable from the concept of its sovereign. In the traditional understanding, the Christian god granted the absolute right to rule a territory to a hereditary monarch. A few exceptions to this rule existed, but they were mostly carved out to protect the traditional rights of institutions such as the Catholic Church and powerful merchant guilds. The concept of a state that derived its legitimacy from a universal idea like self-governance was laughable, and apologists for absolutism openly scoffed at the idea that a state could exist independent from a monarch as anything more than a short-lived and chaotic experiment.

The social force that broke the back of this idea was not the American Revolution. The idea of a merchant republic was familiar to those in Europe during that time, and the notion that the British colonial government of America would be replaced by an oligarchy of wealthy merchants and slave owners was considered radical but not inconceivable by the powers of the Old World.

The more revolutionary project was the one that started in France in 1789. It grew from a demand for equal formal representation for the Third Estate (largely comprising the French middle class) into a radically new conception of what a ‘state’ should be. The storming of the notorious Bastille prison on July 14, 1789 marked a watershed moment in human history. For the first time, the destruction of the old, absolutist European order became not only possible, but inevitable.

The French Revolution was not only a political revolution, but a social one. It sought not to make peace with the old European order, but to abolish it entirely. Its experiments in radical democracy, secular government, and an unyielding demand that the powerful answer for their crimes served as the inspiration for two centuries of popular resistance to colonial, monarchical, and oppressive forms of government.

Over the next two centuries, popular uprisings and mass movements around the world dismantled the power of monarchy to dominate human affairs. This was most notable in the periods following the two world wars, when revolutionary and anti-colonial movements toppled monarchs and freed peoples from foreign dominion. Today, over 80% of the world’s governments have abandoned hereditary monarchy, and a significant portion of the remaining countries maintain a monarch only as a constitutional symbol with little or no political power.

***

The French Revolution informed and influenced nearly every leftist movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Karl Marx called it “the most colossal revolution that history has ever known.” During the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks were intimately familiar with the details of each stage of the French Revolution. They openly considered themselves the successors to the radical left-wing Jacobin faction, for whom the American socialist magazine of record is named.

The modern French Fifth Republic also traces its roots back to 1789, but the ideals of the period represent something far greater, and we can celebrate the history of republicanism without having to defer to nationalist propaganda or a founding myth. Nor do we as socialists have to apologize for the revolutionary violence of the early French republicans. As noted American humorist Mark Twain wrote in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court:

There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

As free people, it is our right and responsibility to choose what to celebrate in this world. The principles of self governance, universal human rights, freedom from arbitrary rule, and anti-monarchism are the basis for modern socialism. Even as we confront the new horrors of a global system in crisis, we must also remember and celebrate the victories that have brought us to this point. There is no better time to start than right now.

Vive le monde républicain.

The post No Kings appeared first on Midwest Socialist.