Kansas City Protesting Trump’s Actions, Late January 2017

Spencer Graves is your host for this Thursday Night Special episode of RadioActive Magazine.  It gives a brief overview of some of the actions in late January 2017 expressing concern about some of the things done by the Trump administration. This includes his ban on entry for many people from Muslim-majority countries, attempts by several groups of between 10 and 150 people to visit Kansas City offices of members of the US Congress, and a Resource Fair on Sunday, January 29, organized by IndivisibleKC and others. The opinions expressed are those of the host and guests and are not official positions of the Mid-Coast Radio Project, nor 90.1 FM, KKFI, Kansas City Community Radio.

Last Friday, January 27, 2017, President Trump signed an executive order that barred citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US for at least the next 90 days, including people who are also US citizens or with legal work permits and family in the United States.

Sally Q. Yates, the acting U.S. Attorney General, told Justice Department lawyers, “I am not convinced … that the executive order is lawful.” She was immediate fired. Reporters for the New York Times compared her dismissal to the 1973 “Saturday Night Massacre,” when President Nixon fired his attorney general and deputy attorney general for refusing to dismiss the special prosecutor in the Watergate case.

News of the executive order spread, and protests sprung up all over the world. Two people in Kansas City announced an Event on Facebook called, “Kansas City MCI Protest: Muslim Ban”, asking people to come to Terminal C at the Kansas City International Airport between 2 to 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, January 29. When I checked that Facebook page on Wednesday, February 1, it said that 893 people actually went and 2,600 were “Interested”.

Anti-Trump organizing began all over the world the day after the election. A group of people in the Kansas City area started to connect spontaneously with “Pantsuit Nation,” which had started as a private Facebook group after the last Presidential debate, October 19. It had almost 3 million members by the time of the election.

However, the national Pantsuit group was considering applying for 501c3 non-profit status, and the Kansas City organizers did not want to be constrained by 501c3 status. They split off as Progressive Social Network Kansas City, keeping the initials PSNKC. It is a private Facebook group with a public persona at IndivisibleKC.com.

MoveOn has also been organizing here. These groups collaborated with others in organizing visits to the Kansas City offices of US Representatives and Senators. Roughly 50 people went to Senator Claire McCaskill’s Kansas City office to ask her to oppose Trump’s nominees.

IndivisibleKC reported having organized three different visits to Senator Roy Blunt’s Kansas City office involving roughly 30, 60 and 100 people, respectively. Staff at Blunt’s office listened to constituent concerns, which focused on Betsy DeVos, Jeff Sessions, the Muslim ban, the Affordable Care Act and more.

The staff for Senator Roberts refused to talk with more than a dozen people, and explicitly excluded journalists. Police were called and the other 130 were told to leave the private property. Attendees asked why a public servant would have office space paid by tax money in a bank on private property, where citizens were not allowed peaceably to assemble, as guaranteed by the First Amendment.

Senator Moran’s staff was more welcoming. They listened to the roughly 125 people who came. A member of his staff said that “Senator Moran would like to ask Ms. DeVos more questions”. A person in that group said, “There are few senators more conservative than Jerry Moran, and here is his staffers showing hints of hedging on DeVos. THIS IS WORKING.”

PSNKC RESOURCE FAIR, JANUARY 29, 2017 

In addition to these recent protests, PSNKC also organized a Resource Fair at Kansas City Kansas Community College last Sunday, January 29, with tables where people could learn about groups working in this area.

The rest of this episode consists of interviews recorded at this Resource Fair with representatives of 14 of the groups tabling there.

Links to these 14 groups are provided with the description of this episode of RadioActive Magazine.

PSNKC and IndivisibleKC 

We begin with background from Emily Riegel and Hillary Shields, two of the founding members of PSNKC.

[Emily]: We are two of the founding members of PSNKC — Progressive Social Network – Kansas City.

[Spencer]: Two from your group made presentations to the Johnson County Democratic Women a couple of weeks ago.

[Emily]: Yes, that was Laura and I. We did start of as a local chapter of Pant Suit Nation, but we wanted to be more active and do more political work and active organizing work, we had to change our name. We felt like we were going in a different direction than the national Pant Suit group. I think that our idea for this and inspiration for putting this together came within about two and a half weeks after the election. We were putting together a meeting, and we thought there might be some interest in having people come and have tables there. But it was also pretty clear that there might be a lot of organizations that might want to table. So we decided let’s just set a date in January and see if maybe 20 or 30 tables want to come, and if we can get 150 or 200 people out and learn about them, that will be great.

In the last six weeks as we’ve seen now over 65 organizations that wanted to come have tables, and what seems to be hundreds if not thousands of people coming through here today. What we thought about 10 weeks ago putting together, we thought we’d have to be successful.

I keep looking around the room in there, and I’m stunned in the best way but also the most disheartening way, in that it took such a disaster for this to happen and for people to feel this need. But at least now we’re moving forward hopefully with something positive.

And there are so many organizations in that room. And they’re networking too, which is really amazing to see. But we wanted to bring as many progressive organizations or charities together. People who need volunteers in Kansas City together into one room and get our 16,000 plus members involved in Kansas City. Because how different would Kansas City look if all of them showed up and volunteered.

[Spencer]: 16,000 is the spontaneous membership of PSNKC

Yes: Which has existed since the day after the election.

PSNKC remains a secret Facebook group. But one of our organizations that we’re very proud of that was born out of PSNKC is IndivisibleKC. So you can find out about what actions we are planning by following IndivisibleKC on Facebook or as indivisiblekc.com.

Crescent Peace Society 

My name is Ahmed Shabbir. I’m 16 years old. I’m the fourth son of Mahnaz Shabbir. I’m here representing the Crescent Peace Society organization.

The Crescent Peace Society was founded after the 1995 Oklahoma bombing, when the children of some of our board directors were at school, and they had instances where people would come up to them and bully them and tell them that the terrorist attack was by Muslims.

So my Mother and some of her friends started this group called the Crescent Peace Society, where they try to diversify the community by showing what actually happens in Islam, and not what the media portrays. It’s been going on for the past 20 years. We go around the community and the region and the state talking about Islam. We go to churches, synagogs, temples, community centers,

[Spencer]: Like George Washington.[1]

[Ahmed]: Yes. We hope to give the community a better understanding of what exactly the Muslim faith does, and how we’re NOT like the ISIS groups and terrorist groups. We’re more just like everyone else here in our community and the state. We’re just trying to live normal lives like everyone else.

It’s kind of nice having this opportunity to show and demonstrate the reality of what our religion is.

And so the Crescent Peace Society volunteers at different organizations. Helps at the Women’s March. Helps other organizations and volunteer opportunities. Just to show that we’re all here together. We’re all one group of people, and we should all encourage each other to grow and not to hate each other.

Go on Google and type “Crescent Peace Society – Kansas City”.

[Spencer]: Would you care to comment on the report that President Trump has issued a ban on people traveling from selected Muslim countries, which does NOT include any of the countries with which he’s been doing business, according to the news sources I’ve seen?

[Ahmed]: It’s kind of ironic, where we say that American is the land of the brave and home of the free, that America is a place where we accept everyone. Ellis Island. It’s a dream to come to America and live the American life style. And we have a president who really doesn’t care about the millions of people who want to achieve this goal and try to diversify ourselves

[Spencer]: No more the land of the brave and home of the free, but for Trump, the land of the fearful and cowardly.

[Ahmed]: Exactly.

Kansas-Missouri Dream Alliance

My name is Ana Jimenez. I’m with the Kansas Missouri Dream Alliance. Our organization focuses on working with youth and immigrant students in our community. One of our main focuses is on having our local community students pursue higher education. Right now, one of our focuses is in providing as much information available to our community to reduce anxiety and uncertainty, especially around the DACA, Deferred Action of Childhood Arrivals, so there’s a lot of uncertainty. Our students are scared. We don’t know what’s going to happen.

Why it’s important, it’s because we are the Latino community in Kansas and Missouri: It’s a very important community. We provide and we bring a lot into our community here locally. And we want to make sure we have our voices heard.

We are an affiliate of United, We Dream, which is a national organization. We try to engage and involve as many students. We also try to engage with other local organizations to help each other out in the same efforts. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and our web site:

http://www.ksmoda.org

https://www.facebook.com/KSMODA/

http://ksmodreamalliance.blogspot.com

Loud Light 

I’m Davis Hammet with Loud Light.  We’re focused on increasing youth civic participation. Kansas has one of the lowest youth civic involvements in the nation. People should care, because we have a very skewed electorate. The current government does not represent all the people of Kansas, because young people aren’t participating.

To learn more, you can go to LoudLight.org for information about this and the skewed elections in Kansas.

I also do 3-minute recaps of the Kansas legislature so you can easily digest that, because I know it can be really complicated to keep up with state government. Some other things we do is we teach classes in college classrooms across the state about civic power, so young people can think about it differently than thinking about federal elections, which often make people feel powerless. We try to get young people to think about local elections, which sometimes city council races are won by 40 votes, and you can have a lot of impact, and that’s where the real impact can be.

[Spencer]: Or not even that, because in some cases one person is running uncontested.

[Davis]: Yeah, that’s another problem that we have so many races that are uncontested. And again, it’s a problem of apathy, the lack of civic knowledge, the fact that we don’t have civics courses anymore in this state.

[Spencer]: People don’t understand that the primary difference between rich and poor countries is politics. The primary difference between rich and poor people within any country including the United States is politics.

[Davis]: Yeah, there’s increasing data that shows that when you get civically involved, it actually produces better health outcomes, that whenever you take that power, you become civically empowered to demand change of your government, it actually ends up improving the quality of your life, because you become empowered in other aspects of your life.

Dialogue Institute of the Southwest – Kansas City

My name is Ayup Hassan from Dialogue Institute of the Southwest – Kansas City, which is a nonprofit organization that promotes peace, dialogue and mutual understanding. We organize a variety of events that bring people from diverse backgrounds. People can hear about the organization by going to dialoguekc.org and also Facebook: Dialogue Institute of the Southwest Kansas City.

We organize a variety of events including annual dialogue and friendship dinner that attracts almost 300 people and many organizations such as police departments, 10,000 Villages, Habitat for Humanity, universities like UMKC, Park, KU, city administrators, county administrators, and others.

We try to create peace islands and get rid of fear islands.

GLSEN – Greater Kansas City

I’m David Alonzo. I’m the chair of GLSEN – Greater Kansas City. Every other year, a publication called the National School Climate is published. This is the first year they’ve been able to pull out statistics from the state of Kansas giving the opinion of how safe the schools are for LGBTQ students. We’ve had it for the last 3 surveys in Missouri.

You can contact us at our web site or Facebook page or by writing to “[email protected]”.

Our name, GLSEN, used to stand for Gay-Lesbian and Straight Education Network. However, since that does not include gender identity expression, we just use those initials as our brand name.

Johnson County Democratic Women

My name is Val Baul, and I’m with the Johnson County Democratic Women.

I think people should join a party, because democracy should be fun, and it’s also not a spectator sport.  You have to participate.

Democracy is kind of like KKFI, because KKFI is a volunteer organization, kind of in the sense that you want it, you do it. Democracy is the same. So you can come join us on the Kansas side if you’d like.

We are at jcdwks.org.

[Spencer]: Or they can do a web search for the Democratic Party of Johnson County, KS

[Val]: Yes: http://www.jocodems.org/

KC for Refugees 

My name is Mandy McKinney. I’m a board member of KC for Refugees. We’re a local interfaith organization that acts as a liaison between the public, who wants to help and be educated on refugees,

and the local UNHCR resettlement agencies so we can help provide them with support and facilitate resources.

You can find us on Facebook, or you can email “[email protected]”

Right now out big push is for advocacywith the current administration’s new orders. He’s creating a lot of problems for not only refugees coming into the country, but also for the refugees who are currently here.

They’re going to be losing funding, and we’re encouraging our supporters to offer up donations to the three UNHCR agencies in Kansas City: Catholic charities of Northeast Kansas, Della Lam, Jewish Vocational Services on the Missouri side.

[Spencer]: Just in the last 24 hours, I’ve heard that Trump has banned people from certain Muslim countries that excluded countries with which he has personal business. Do you have a comment on that?

I think it’s pretty obvious looking at the countries he’s excluded vs. the countries that he is choosing to ban refugees and immigrants from. I think it’s important to note that it’s not just refugees that are affected. It’s people who have dual citizenship — US and one of those countries. They’ve been American citizens for who knows how long, and we’ve never had a problem with them before. It’s not based on evidence. It’s based in for lack of a better word fear mongering. I think the American public is smarter than that. The current outcry against it speaks volumes.

Kansas chapter of the Sierra Club

I’m Carrie Herndon with the Kansas chapter of the Sierra Club.

The Sierra Club is the largest national environmental advocacy organization.

[Spencer]: Founded by John Muir.

[Carrie]: Founded by John Muir way back in the late 1800s, but currently we’re involved in a broad range of issues. It started out being an organization primarily focused on conservation of land and water resources.

But we’re in all things environmental these days. The Kansas chapter is working out putting together the people’s climate march 2017 to coincide with the national march that’s coming up that same day in Washington, DC, and we’re going to be organizing that same effort here locally.

We’re also working on putting together a climate parent’s organization, so parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, family members who are interested in the effects of the environment on their children get in touch with us. We’d love to hear from you. We’ll help organize that.

We also have established a lobby corps to work with our legislators on environmental issues.

You can find us on Facebook.  You can find us on the web.

NAACP of Johnson County, KS 

I’m Fred Jones. I’m President of the Johnson County NAACP, the oldest civil rights organization in the United States.

[Spencer]: That’s the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

[Fred]: The misconception is that this organization is for colored people only. We’re a civil rights group, and we help anyone no matter nationality or religion to help them alleviate racial profiling or any religious problems. We need to continue this work now of all times that we have so many misfortunate people being discriminated against. We’re here to support the community. This is what we do.

[Spencer]: A web search for NAACP of Johnson County, KS will find you.

[Spencer]: Recent news reports claimed that Trump issued an executive order blocking entry into the US from certain Muslim countries but carefully excluded countries with which he has business relations. Your comment?

[Fred]: I think the country made a bad choice and we have to live with it for now, but we have to fight it every step of the way to let them know that we’re not going to stand for this.

Kansas Appleseed Center for Law and Justice 

Matt Conklin:  I represent Kansas Appleseed Center for Law and Justice.  People should care, because we’re at a critical moment in our nation’s history right now, especially in the state of Kansas, where there is a lot of need, a lot of resources needing to be protected and strengthened in the state of Kansas, to provide for families and youth, specifically.  They’ve been marginalized and on the fringes of society.

People can find us on our web site, kansasappleseed.org, and we’re also on Facebook at Kansas Appleseed.

350 KC

I’m John Fish-Kurmann with 350 KC.

We’re part of the International Climate Justice movement.  We’re working on the climate change emergency, which is really the biggest, the most ultimate challenge that we face, because if we don’t deal with that and deal with it soon, it’s going to devastate whatever progress we make on the other progressive issues that we care about.

So we really have to stop Trump from everything he and his administration are trying to do to undo the climate actions that President Obama has taken.  And we need to get us back on track to get a big, rapid climate mobilization to deal with this challenge.

People can find us on Facebook.  Also, we have a web site:  350kc.org.

So you can reach us through that if you’d like to get involved in our local activities.

Lawyers for Good Government 

My name is Allison Kort.  I’m an attorney here in Kansas City, and I’m representing Lawyers for Good Government.

Lawyer for Good Government was started as a response to the election on November ninth.  As attorneys who said, “What can we do?”  “What can we do to help procure justice, to help fight against things like what are happening right now, with the refugee crisis.  Who is going to need our help?”

We provide essentially a repository of attorneys to be dispatched to various organizations that are already in existence.

Lawyers for Good Government is not a separate legal entity. or rather it is a separate legal entity, but we’re not fighting our own agenda.

We’re providing education and resources and litigation and research for organizations such as the ACLU, the NAACP, Planned Parenthood, other organizations.

[Spencer]: How do you differ from the ACLU?

[Allison]:  We’re there to provide whatever we can.  For instance, I have a hundred people in the Kansas group.  I know there are at least twice that many in the Missouri group.  It got so big.

Lawyers for Good Government was initially started as Lawyers of the Left, which we changed.  And now it’s so big, we have 140,000 attorneys all over the country that we’ve divided into provisional chapters by state.

I’m trying to reach out to people who are involved both in Kansas and Missouri, who might be interested in donating their own time and resources to existing legal aid organizations.

You can find me on Facebook.  We have a number of closed Facebook groups including L4GG – Kansas and Missouri.

You can find us on the web at lawyersforgoodgovernment.org.

Indivisible KC 

I’m Rochelle Norman.  I’m on the executive committee for Indivisible KC.

We are teaching people how to be politically active, how to reach out to their senators and representatives for political action.  We’re organizing visits to our senators’ offices to start to get people used to that kind of action.

And then we’re going to be branching out so we can have teams in each congressional district to really help us all have a more impactful voice in our community with our members of congress, who need to be listening to their constituents.

You can find us on Facebook.  There you can sign up to get on our email list, so you can find out about the actions that we’re going to be having.

Photo courtesy of Working Journalist Press, copyright under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International License.

[1] Washington supported religious diversity and attended services with different congregations, often with Anglican, Quaker, and Catholic congregations.  He also explicitly supported Jews, Muslims and atheists.

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