While the Trump administration and Elon Musk work to enrich themselves and dismantle pillars of our government like Social Security and the Department of Education, you may have missed something even more dangerous.

This headline from the Associated Press nearly stopped me in my tracks:

Donald Trump just signed an executive order to overhaul our elections -- making it harder for tens of millions of Americans to vote. If you don’t meet overly strict voter ID requirements or if you choose to vote by mail, you could be shut out of the democratic process. And Trump is even threatening to withhold critical election funding from states that refuse to comply with his illegal demands.

Let’s call this what it is: voter suppression.

Trump and his extreme MAGA allies want you to believe this is about protecting election integrity. It’s not. It’s an attack on our democracy. It’s Jim Crow 2.0 -- a new iteration of an old form of discrimination designed to suppress Black and brown voters, just like the old Jim Crow laws were meant to keep Black Americans out of public life.

I say this from experience. In college, I organized demonstrations to desegregate lunch counters. And as a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, I worked with other activists like the late Congressman John Lewis to organize and persuade President Lyndon Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law.

This isn’t an issue of politics -- the right to vote is a sacred cornerstone of our democracy. We cannot afford to stay silent. We must act. 

Please make a contribution today to join me in this fight. There must be free and unfettered access to the ballot box.

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Democracy is on the line. Let’s rise up, organize, and make sure every voice is heard.

Thank you,

Jim