Immediately after the massacre at Tree of Life Synagogue, Jews in Pittsburgh rose up to tell Trump he wasn’t welcome in their city unless he denounced white nationalism.
Their simple, urgent demand galvanized the nation. A week later on Election Day, we saw a wave of voters replace dozens of the enablers of the Trump Administration’s bigotry and hate. But our work to defeat white nationalism is far from done.
Today, Bend the Arc: Jewish Action is launching a new campaign to demand that every Representative and Senator of the incoming Congress go on the record to reject white nationalism — before they’re sworn in on January 3.
Can you help us launch in a big way? It’s going to take all of us to get this demand into the hands of as many members of Congress as possible before they are sworn in on January 3.
Go to www.RejectWhiteNationalism.org right now to find your members of Congress and ask them to sign on. You can filter by state and then use the Twitter and Facebook icons to send them messages directly.
Here’s the simple declaration we’re asking our elected leaders to affirm:
“I unequivocally reject white nationalism and recognize it is a threat to individuals, communities, and American democracy itself.”
The first step in fighting a threat is seeing it with clear eyes. Since Trump began his campaign for president, hate crimes against Jews and other targeted communities are on the rise for the third year in a row.1 In the midterm elections we saw the Republican party fully embrace racist, anti-immigrant, and antisemitic rhetoric — even after those same messages had incited the largest antisemitic massacre in our country’s history, just days after an attempted shooting at a black church and murder of two black people in Louisville, Kentucky.
The threat of white nationalism will continue to grow, taking more lives and threatening more communities, unless we intervene. Because the political ideology of white nationalism — which seeks to build a country for white people only — has fully moved from the fringes to the mainstream.
Members of Congress new and old must choose a side: will they unequivocally denounce white nationalism, or will they remain silent and allow our lives, communities and democracy itself to be threatened?
This past year, Bend the Arc volunteers and donors poured our hearts into Interrupt Trump, the largest Jewish grassroots campaign to flip the House in 2018, because we desperately needed a check on authoritarianism and white nationalism.
We succeeded in flipping the House, and now we have to set the agenda. That’s where www.RejectWhiteNationalism.org comes in. Together, we can demand the new Congress clearly identify the threat of white nationalism, stop its policies that target our communities, and hold elected leaders accountable for spreading its toxic ideology.
Thank you for taking this next step with us to defeat this growing white nationalist movement and the hate it spreads. Together, we will build a multi-racial democracy where all of us can live, love and thrive.
Sources:
1. CBS News, FBI report shows spike in hate crimes for 3rd year in a row.
