THE ORIGINAL FUCK YOU

A Field Dispatch from the Edge of the American Experiment

In 1776, a group of scraggly, treasonous, utterly unrespectable radicals sat down and wrote the most audacious breakup letter in human history.

They were writing it to a king.

The message was simple: Go fuck yourself. We’re done.

They dressed it up in Latin-adjacent language and called it a Declaration, because even revolutionaries understood branding. But strip away the parchment and the powdered wigs and the mythology we’ve lacquered over it for 250 years and that’s what it was. A middle finger, notarized.

July 4th was the original No Kings Day. This is worth remembering.

Because in approximately three weeks, the fascists currently occupying the apparatus of American government are going to wrap themselves in flags and eat hot dogs and call it patriotism, and I need you to understand, in your bones, that they are doing it all wrong.

We are going to D.C. for Seven Days to do it right.

Because it's worth doing.

We are doing it because we care.

Every one of us who has been paying attention have felt discouraged at times. When millions of people in the streets across the country became a shrug. When court orders became suggestions the administration violated gleefully. When journalists started getting arrested at dawn at their homes in the suburbs for the crime of pointing a camera at a protest. When millions lost food assistance and the administration called it a win. When citizens of this country were murdered in the streets by masked men who still haven't been held accountable.

We have felt it. The momentum going out of the thing. The specific silence after.

We are still here anyway.

That matters more than it sounds. This system was engineered for our exhaustion. The cruelty is not incidental. It is load-bearing. They need us tired. They need us to look at what has happened to the courts, to the press, to the bodies of people we organized to protect, and conclude that showing up is theater. They need us to decide that the fight is finished, that it is useless to resist.

The fight is not finished.

But we need to be honest about where we are.

Small actions have carried us this far but they cannot carry us the rest of the way alone.

We know this. The marches, the vigils, the calls, the dispatches filed from detention center parking lots at 2 a.m., they mattered. They still matter. But the administration has done the math on our exhaustion and they like the numbers. They are counting on us to keep doing what we’ve been doing, because what we’ve been doing, as necessary as it has been, has not been enough to stop them.

Something has to change in scale.

In duration.

In the willingness to not just show up but to stay. To build something in public view that cannot be dispersed by a news cycle. That does not pack up and go home when the weekend ends. That plants itself in the capital of this country and says:

We are not leaving until this government answers for what it has done.

That is coming.

It has to come.

The logic of this moment demands it.

Let us be absolutely clear, because clarity is the only thing that earns trust right now: Seven Days in DC is not an encampment. It is not the occupation. It is not the moment we go to Washington and refuse to leave until the republic is restored. If you come to the Black Cat on June 28th expecting Resurrection City, you will be disappointed, and this movement cannot afford another disappointment weaponized into apathy.

What Seven Days in DC is is the room where we figure out what comes next.

The coalition-building that has to happen before a sustained action can hold.

The journalism, the organizers, the veteran voices, the conversations between people who have been fighting in their own corners and need to find each other before they can fight together.

The July 4th action on the National Mall. Not a finale. A beginning.

A demonstration that we can still put bodies in the symbolic heart of this country and make them impossible to ignore.

You cannot sustain a camp you haven’t built.

You cannot build it with people you haven’t met.

You cannot meet them if nobody shows up.

We are going to Washington.

For seven days.

June 28th through July 4th.

And, we want you there.

Not in a polite, “we’d love to have you” way.

In a we need bodies in the street and yours specifically way.

In a the-other-side-is-counting-on-your-exhaustion way.

Bring someone who has been thinking the same things you’ve been thinking.

Split a hotel room.

Sleep on a floor.

Bring your anger and your grief and your ideas about what it looks like when we finally stop going home.

History is not made by people who waited until it was convenient.

It is also not made by people who showed up alone.

We know some of you can’t.

The money isn’t there, or the body, or the safety, and that’s not weakness. That’s the specific cruelty of living inside a system that has been methodically making resistance harder for the people who have the most reason to resist.

We see you.

This moment sees you.

If you can’t be in D.C. for those reasons, we understand.

If you can help others get to D.C., please take this opportunity to help them.

A ticket.

A tank of gas.

A floor to sleep on.

The resistance has always run on what people could spare.

If there is any version of your life in the next three weeks in which Washington, D.C., is possible.

Go.

Not for us.

Go for the people who can’t.

Go for the people who will come after.

Go for the answer to the question every single one of us has been asking:

What comes next?

We find out together.

In Washington.

On the original No Kings Day.

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