National SDS Day of Action 11/19: Stop Trump’s Agenda!

National SDS Day of Action 11/19: Stop Trump’s Agenda! National Students for a Democratic Society is making an official stand to oppose Trump’s right-wing, racist agenda at every turn. We did the same in 2015 when he announced his presidential campaign for the first time: he had debuted a platform based on mass deportations, a US-Mexico border wall, cuts to education and social services, rolling back reproductive rights and rights for women, and more. We as National SDS took up the call to smash every speaking appearance of him and his supporters, every cabinet appointment, and every new executive order or law that he would push. We bashed Trump pinatas on campus as students sought to express their rage at his racist policies.

We are making this commitment again in 2024, with added demands to protect trans youth, defend education and programs such as ethnic studies and diversity offices, oppose attacks on the pro-Palestine student movement, defend free speech on campuses and more. As such, we are announcing a National Day of Action on November 19th on campuses across the US, to call on students and schools to defy Trump.

Trump will only continue supplying Israel in its genocide in Gaza, which has killed over 44,000 Palestinians. He will continue supporting Israel in its attempted invasions of Southern Lebanon which has killed thousands of Lebanese people. Given his recent selection of Pete Hegseth as the Secretary of Defense, who has said “Zionism and Americanism are the front lines of Western civilization and freedom in our world today”, and Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, who has continued to deny a ceasefire in Gaza, Trump will continue ties with the genocidal, Zionist state of Israel which carries out the interests of Wall Street billionaires, who to aim to socially, politically, and economically dominate the Middle East.

Trump seems to want to outdo himself in terms of attacks on the people this time around, especially young people. He was not content with installing Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, a national proponent of private and charter schools and a multimillionaire who directly profits from gutting public education. He now is announcing an overhaul to erode the Department of Education itself, and to strip away federal funding for grants, student loans, all public schools, special education, offices charged with enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and more. This would gut the public education system in momentous ways and restrict working class students and Black, Latino, Chicano students from colleges even more than they already are.

Trump has used his time out of office to continue endorsing more and more racist laws. He campaigns on ending any oversight or any policy resembling community control of the police and will seek to empower racist killer cops who terrorize Black folks in the US, just as he did in 2020 during the Justice for George Floyd uprising. He has endorsed politicians who work to remove even the weakest civilian review boards and who have banned any education about racism, slavery, and topics such as African American Studies.

As a major part of his platform, he has been campaigning on a promise to deport more immigrants, especially Central American immigrants, and even extended this to young people who support Palestine in even greater historic numbers than before. Just as he repealed Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals in 2017, we anticipate continuous and even intensified attacks on immigrants in the US, especially Central American immigrants. He intends to send record funds to militarize the US-Mexico border wall and to reinforce the apartheid government of Israel, which continues a genocide in Gaza that Trump has no intention of stopping.

Labor and workers have nothing to look forward to under Trump either. He and his campaign backers have worked to erode the right of collective bargaining and to try to spread anti-union laws such as right-to-work laws, even as his campaign actively lies about these positions. What few gains labor have made in the last four years, we can expect Trump will attack without hesitation to appeal to his rich, elite backers on Wall Street, who are all barons and moguls just like him.

He used his time in office to advocate rolling back reproductive rights and appointed Supreme Court justices who, with the ruling of Dobbs vs Jackson, nullified Roe vs. Wade and who pushed women’s rights back over 50 years. He and his racist, sexist base, along with governors like Ron DeSantis in Florida, whom Trump endorsed, pushed bans of any discussion of LGBTQ people, discussing sexuality and gender studies, bathroom ban bills, and more. SDS is determined to keep calling protests to defend women’s and reproductive rights just like we did in 2021, when Roe vs Wade was overturned.

Every group amongst the people of the US whom he attacks, SDS supports. Every attack he launches, we will mobilize against. We will do our hardest to deliver the message that students do not support his campaign and his agenda, and that we demand schools oppose them at every turn. It is up to the students and youth to fight against Trump’s agenda directly; we must take matters into our own hands and change society ourselves, and only then will we have a society we can learn in and which we can be proud to learn about.

Join us on our National Students for a Democratic Society Day of Action on November 19th, from West Coast to East Coast!

Dump Trump!
Up With Education, Down With Deportation!
Up With Education, Down With Occupation!
No Trump, No KKK,
No Racist USA!