Rally Speech, October 3, 2026 – Boston, Ma, by Joseph Gerson
Friends,
As Dylan sang, “Let us not talk falsely now/ the hour is getting late.” That applies to us now.
Back in the 1960s there was a film, Mondo Cane, a warning about a world gone to the dogs. With Trump and company driving our nation and the world into more crises than we can count, Mondo Cane has arrived. Continuing Gaza, West Bank and Sudan genocides. The catastrophic and widening war on Iran. ICE Brownshirts’ brutality. The widening Russian-NATO Ukraine War now spreading across Europe. AI gone rogue. The climate emergency. Growing nuclear dangers. Food, medical, and housing insecurity. Affordability.
We are dealing with more than madness and corruption in Washington. The multi-crisis is a manifestation of evil which permeates our society. Our certifiably insane would-be dictator, with repeated threats to eliminate Iran’s people and civilization and his tossing almost a million people off of healthcare are but a few of his regime’s crimes against humanity. All of these issues are inter-related, which is why our resistance must be multi-issue and multi-faceted. November’s elections, just five weeks away, will define our futures, and as in the darkest days of Nazism and Jim Crow, if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. So, defending our albeit flawed constitution and elections, so that we can change policies and actions, must be our priority. We need a united and active front against the lawless would-be dictator and his minions.
Others have focused on the Iran war and Israel’s genocide and wars of expansion. Let me simply say that given new warfighting technologies and Iranian military resistance, and their ignorant arrogance, Trump and Netanyahu lost their war the moment they launched it. Now, fearing the political consequences of his defeat, Trump is leading the world ever deeper into the desert version of Vietnam’s Big Muddy. And, Trump’s imperial Board of Peace has legitimacy, integrity, success and staying power of his reflecting pool repairs. Until Israel withdraws from the lands occupied since its 1967 war of conquest and respects the Palestinians right of national self-determination, there will be no peace in the misnamed Middle East.
The heart of darkness has names: Donald Trump, his allies, and those who are complicit with the imperial military-industrial-Congressional complex. Trump is the racist, corrupt, greedy, insecure, and bullying son of a Ku Klux Klan slumlord, who rose to riches and power with Mafia ties, and with Roy Cohen’s deceitful disregard for truth, the law, and any limits on his desires.
I have the privilege of being part of confidential discussions between current and former U.S., Russian, and European arms control negotiators, government and military officials, and analysists. Just after Trump’s reelection, a Russian asked a former very senior Pentagon official what Trump’s foreign policy priorities would be. The American immediately replied “making as much money as he can for himself and for his family.”
Thus, we have Trump’s seizure of Venezuelan gold and oil, his futile campaigns to transform Gazan and Serbian beaches into his resorts, Don Junior’s wedding party financed by a Putin-related Russian oligarch, and Trump’s corrupt 30,000 stock transactions since he returned to office.
Someone here has to focus on the growing nuclear threat to our species’ survival. This danger has been greatly increased by the Iran war, by Trump’s commitment to resume nuclear weapons testing, and by increasing Pentagon reliance on misnamed tactical nuclear weapons, which can be Hiroshima sized and if used would ignite thermonuclear war.
We are threatened by the wars involving three nuclear powers as they rage across Southwest Asia and Ukraine. Each could expand into other nations’ or escalate to thermonuclear war as Trump and Putin have threatened. China annually adds an estimated 1,000 thermonuclear weapons to its arsenal, making us three nuclear scorpions in an AI augmented bottle. The U.S. played the leading role in sabotaging last May’s Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference, and that in turn encourages proliferation. The war on Iran provides incentives for Iran to follow North Korea in creating a deterrent nuclear arsenal. And then there is Trump’s nuclear deal with Saudia Arabia. In South Korea and Japan, there are powerful pressures for the return of US nuclear weapons or for those nations to become full-fledged nuclear powers. France is extending its nuclear umbrella across Europe. Germany’s U.S. F-35 fighters are designed to launch U.S. supplied B-61 nuclear gravity bombs. Finland will welcome NATO nukes in times of emergency. And fearful of Russia, even Poland is toying with the possibility of becoming a nuclear power.
Friends, we need to focus on the reality that the more nuclear weapons states, nuclear tests, and nuclear exercises there are, the greater the chance that an incident, an accident, or a miscalculation will trigger nuclear war, ending life on this planet as we know it. And incidents, accidents, and miscalculations happen!
Like a virus, Washington’s evil and madness have spread nationally and globally. If we want a democratic, peaceful, and just society, one without Trump/MAGA abusive rule, we have to disempower and remove Trump and all who are complicit with his wars and brutal injustices from power.
Our priority must be creating a united front to defeat Trump’s Congressional duplicitous allies. That means that in addition to pressing our many justice and peace campaigns and supporting voter turnout for progressives and centrist allies, it means insisting on free and fair election – even if necessary, with our bodies. We need to be prepared to launch and join social or general strikes as Jeremy Brecher and others have advocated if necessary. You can go to our CPDCS.Org website to learn how labor unions and others are preparing to defend elections. And not only can you travel to North Carolina or Iowa to campaign for democracy, but you can also take action here in Massachusetts.
And remember, even if Democrats retake Congress, our campaigning on so many urgent justice, peace, and democracy fronts must be renewed taking advantage of any opening we create. Friends, La Lutta Continua. “Don’t mourn. Organize!”
*Joseph Gerson is a MAPA Board Member, President of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security, and Co-President of the International Peace Bureau.