(The following speech was delivered on the steps of City Hall by Samohi student Elliot Ho.)
I feel the need to explain why we have organized this walkout.
We have done so because we believe that we must allow the political backdrop of our everyday lives to burst out from the foreground, from out of our offices and schools, and into the streets. It must live, out in the open, and be unignorable. Unignorable, to our congress members, to our representatives, to all of those who would rather stay silent and apathetic during this political crisis.
I do not wish to be alarmist, but the political situation within our country is, extremely alarming.
The American government has been sold.
It serves only the richest members of its society.
Just this week, Elon Musk, without resistance, has launched and won a coup on the United States. He has seized the treasury from congress, providing him and his associates full access to your social security numbers, your addresses, phone numbers, and bank information. Leaks from the treasury department have come out revealing that his team is installing their private servers into the databases of our government. Simultaneously the Department of Justice has also vowed to protect musk to the full extent of the law, and to prosecute anyone who stands as an obstacle in DOGE’s operation. It must be said that Elon Musk has been given full, unrestricted access to the chambers of the United States government.
In just these eighteen days, Donald Trump has done unspeakable damage to the institutions of our government. On his first day in office he worked to repeal pages and pages worth of civil rights legislation and protections dating back 60 years. He continues to mobilize for the deportation of millions of immigrants, tearing families apart. He plans for the expansion of concentration camps, to send thousands to El Salvador and Guantanamo. Just yesterday, he suggested the complete ethnic cleansing of the gaza strip, containing 2 million people, and following it with the construction of luxury hotels atop the mass graves there. While Americans struggle to pay for gas, or groceries, or even pay rent, he allocates 500 billion to AI research, to the benefit of Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg, at the detriment of the American tax payer.
The United States has abandoned the Paris Climate Accords. The United States has abandoned the world health organization. Those in power continue to challenge the integrity of our constitution, and work to dismantle essential federal agencies like the Department of Education.
We are drowning and they prefer that we do nothing.
They want us to be apathetic.
They want us silent. and with our heads down, to continue working and attending classes while our world is torn apart. They like that we would rather shut our eyes and hold our ears instead of facing the music. This is the reality.
Every moment spent protesting is a victory.
All legislative safeguards, all checks on power, on wealth, are under threat at this very moment, and have been for the past three weeks. Our congress is idle, allowing the executive branch to take complete hold over the nation. the political landscape becomes more hostile, more of our rights are revoked day by day. The United States escalates global tensions, alienates our allies, initiates global conflicts, and continues to terrorize the citizens of foreign nations. In our cities, police beat and shoot at protestors, federal agents from ICE patrol the streets and disappear members of our communities, while millions suffer the violence of poverty on our streets and under bus stops.
First, they are coming for migrants, gays, arabs, brown people, trans people, and the poor, and then they will target doctors, and human rights lawyers, teachers, professors, artists, writers, and musicians, and then they will target activists, and donald trump’s political opponents, and then it will be too late. We know that this is what will happen because it’s what the conservatives loyal to Trump and currently in office, have promised to do through project 2025.
They are already passing legislation to rescind the rights of student activists, they are already investigating FBI agents who prosecuted the January 6th insurrectionists, and they are already removing the language around the existence of trans and queer people. Texts and literature on the histories of civil rights, slavery, colonialism, fascism, and exploitation are actively being removed from the education within our schools.
This is how fascism begins.
Fascists oppose life. They wish to erase our humanity, divide us, and to forget ourselves. We have seen this before, many times, and on the mechanisms of fascism, there is sadly enormous precedent.
If we don’t protest now, we will not have the right to a 2028 election. If we don’t act now, we will not have the right to a midterm election. it is possible that soon our right to conduct ourselves as we have today, to protest, will be gone.
The belief that “ it couldn’t happen here” is what brought it here. Inaction, and apathy is what brought it here. The American century is coming to a sudden and violent end, and the choice now for the American people, and for all people, is to decide a course of action. Our choices right now will be historical, they will be studied, and recorded. Future texts will fervently study the conditions which led us to this crossroads, and most importantly, our response.
The difference between an America which silently allows its democratic institutions to fall and one where its people loudly disrupt the mechanisms of exploitation and colonialism are monumental. Will we let the American empire, and its few wealthy oligarchs, drag its people down with it into a century of poverty and suffering without resistance or dissent? Will we allow them to dismember our democracy, our rights, divide and imprison us, drain the earth of its resources, poison our air, our water, our soil, our ecosystems, use slave labor, all to make a handful of men richer? Will we allow them to throw the masses of this earth onto a burning pyre without resistance?
We are here today to make the case that the youth of this city, of this country, refuse to be complicit bystanders in history. We are here to be seen, to be vocal, and heard in our dissent. We will not allow oligarchs to destroy this earth. We stand by our education, and refuse history or language to be rewritten as to erase the realities of apartheid, genocide, fascism, colonialism, or Capital. We stand by our immigrant communities, who are our coworkers, teachers, friends, family, and allies. We stand by our environment, which is not dying but is being murdered, by flesh and blood people, who walk between the lanes of Mar a Lago, and the capitol, and the offices of Tesla, Amazon, and Google.
We stand by the fact that we are queer, and have been throughout all of history, and so refuse to be erased from it. We stand by democracy, freedom, intellectualism, education, empathy, love, and community. On the question of deciding to act, the stakes are too high, and too personal. As of right now, as students, we can see no future to prepare for, besides a world of instability and uncertainty. But we have to be prepared to undergo the immense work it will take to rebuild and push for change. together, we must build a world that contains a future worth living in.
As Santa Monica students, we have assembled at the steps of our city hall to demand from our city that our rights be unequivocally upheld and protected. We are aware that not only is our president ignoring the voice of the people, but is actively attempting to erase our histories and identities. We are here to demand that as constituents of the representatives in this city hall, our voices be heard. not only do we expect a response, but we expect our call for extensive legal and civil protections be met, and passed through as resolutions.
