From the May 2025 edition of The Prairie Progressive, Iowa’s oldest progressive newsletter. The PP is  funded entirely by reader subscription, available in hard copy for $15/yr.  Send check to PP, Box 1945, Iowa City 52244. Click here for archived issues

This speech, transcribed and edited, was delivered to several hundred people rallying
in downtown Iowa City on April 19 to protest the actions of the Trump administration.

“Autocrats are much weaker than they appear, and the people are much stronger than they know.”

by Ali Hanson

I’m a physician-scientist affiliated with the university, but I’m speaking in my own personal capacity today. I’m supposed to speak about science, but I’m going a little rogue because this is so much bigger than science. They are coming for all of us in every sector
of this country.

They have been trying to distract us by getting us riled up every Friday at five with their newest cuts to this program or that program or this scientific word or that one. But they’re not after a specific scientific subject or word. They’re after knowledge itself. They’re after free speech and they’re after our minds.

Dictators and autocrats don’t an educated, free-thinking citizenry that can be critical of what they’re doing. They are after absolute power and absolute control. Do not be fooled. These are not normal times. It might be nice out here, we might be having some music, but
this is some scary shit.

Remember this moment. Here, in this country, in Iowa City. At the moment the revolution really begins. As Ezra Klein said in The New York Times, the emergency is now. The emergency isn’t tomorrow. The emergency isn’t in one week, or a month, or six
months. It is now.

We’ve all heard about a man driving his car in Maryland with his 5-year old son. Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. He’s lived in this country for ten years. He gets pulled over and suddenly told: your immigration status has changed.

No phone call, no lawyer, gone. To a foreign country, and not to any old foreign country. He got put into one of the world’s worst prisons, a mega-prison. A concentration camp for suspected terrorists with no evidence whatsoever of him being any such thing. The
administration tried to say this was an administrative error. What kind of error is it to take somebody and put them in a prison where you get no exercise, no education, you eat some slop with your hands. It’s a cage for human beings sitting on a metal plate, naked. A reporter got in there and it was silent. You ever been to a prison that was silent? What kind of shit has to go on in there for you to be silent?

They whisk this guy away and try to say it was an accident. The Supreme Court said no, you need to bring him back. You gotta facilitate his return. Are they doing that? No, he’s still there. In any other time, our government would have had this guy back in 24 hours. He’s still there. Not only is he still there, but the government is using your tax dollars,
15 billion dollars, to pay for him to stay there. We don’t know even where this money is coming from. 15 billion to pay El Salvador to cage our people with no due process.

If that doesn’t hit home, doesn’t resonate with you, just know that if it can happen to this person, it can happen to you. It can happen to me for saying these words right now because Trump has made himself the judge, jury, and executioner. He gets to decide if he doesn’t like what I’m saying, which he probably doesn’t. Tomorrow morning I might
wake up and there might be masked men outside with an unmarked car and away I go. I can be disappeared. That’s the world we live in today.

What does this tell us? It tells us a couple of very important things. One, the courts are not going to save us. I keep hearing this from everybody everywhere. Just wait, it’ll all work itself out in the courts. It’s not gonna work itself out in the courts. They found a loophole in our government. The founding fathers thought we were smart enough to not put a
lunatic in the highest office in the land, but somehow we did and he’s gonna disobey the court’s orders. There’s nothing we’re going to be able to do about that.

I’ve also heard: let’s just wait till the elections come. We’ll vote ‘em out! I don’t know that we’re gonna have elections. I’m not here to fearmonger, but someone’s gotta say this.

I don’t know that we’re gonna have elections. The courts aren’t gonna save us. The elections are probably not gonna save us, because even if we have them, they’re probably gonna mess around with them, I have a feeling. So who’s gonna fucking save us? (Crowd: “We are!”) Right! We’re going to save us. They want us to be afraid. And it works. There
are a lot of people not here today because they can’t be here, which is why people with privilege, it is our duty and our obligation to stand up and speak out.

We ain’t gonna be afraid, right? This isn’t the time to get scared, this is the time to get smart. I come from a sports background where it was: you gotta know your opponent’s playbook. You gotta go scout these people. Guess what? They gave us their playbook. Project 2025. We know what they’re doing. They’re doing exactly what they said. We
shouldn’t be surprised. We know exactly what they plan to do. It’s only gonna get worse from here.

We have our own playbook, however. Y’all are probably already familiar with Timothy Snyder, but there’s a couple other people you might not be as familiar with: Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth, who wrote the book “Why Civil Resistance Works.” We have some
lessons from this book. They studied different governments from1900 to 2006, and they said, what works? Nonviolent resistance or violent resistance? Over twice as effective was nonviolent resistance. Why?

One answer is the moral argument— not everyone is willing to take up arms and go kill people. Probably good, right? Two, it takes a lot of strength and effort to go fight a fuckin’ war. If we can get many more people to join a nonviolent movement, we can get much more creative with our strategies.

Read this book while you still can and teach it to others while we still can. We can’t keep having the same people that think like we do show up here. We need different pillars of society to get involved. We need religious leaders, business leaders, professionals, labor unions, universities, you name it. We need everybody to get involved with this.

What is Donald Trump other than a child throwing a tantrum in one of the most expensive bedrooms in the country? The only way he has power is if we do what he says. He loses all his power if when he says, “go dig the ditches and put the bodies in,” we don’t go. Or if he says, “pick him up and take him to El Salvador,” no one’s gonna fly the plane. This is the
level of involvement we’re going to need.

There’s two ways to do this. We’re doing the first one right now, which is sort of centralized organization: protest publicly. But mark my words, they’re coming for this kind of thing, and soon. If you remember the George Floyd protests, they turned the United States military on its citizens. That’s coming. But when that happens, there are dispersion
tactics. You go home, and we do boycotts, and we do sit-ins, and we do walk-outs, and we just get in the fuckin’ way. We call this collective stubbornness. We know how to do this, Iowa. We’ve been kids before. Your mom tells you to go to bed. No! I’m not going!

We have examples from history how to do this. You’ve heard that today is the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, but what we don’t know or hear about often is that there was about a decade of nonviolent resistance before the Revolutionary War. We were actually independent from Britain before that war really even started. We had the
most effective boycotts in the history of the world. 90 to 98 percent of people participated. We said we’re not buying anything more from Britain. We’re not paying any more taxes. We’re making our own rules.

They couldn’t govern us anymore. Autocrats are much weaker than they appear, and the people are much stronger than they know.

Of course, you have the civil rights movement with sit-ins, freedom rides, and bus boycotts. And you’ve got the Gandhi example in India, where they also stopped buying British goods. They walked 240 miles to the sea and made their own salt, and they didn’t quit until the jails were so full they couldn’t arrest any more people. Can you imagine if
we get enough people to get involved with a nonviolent, non-cooperation act in this United States, we fill the prisons with people like this, and we have a party in the prison? I don’t suggest we all go to prison, but we gotta get creative and radical here.

We just gotta put our heads together. We gotta get creative. We can boycott Tesla. We can boycott Amazon. We can do all kinds of shit—that’s why we’re all here. We need to talk to each other. And this is a day of action. Do what you can where you are right now. Don’t think about it, just do something.

The rest of the world is watching, and they are terrified. They are depending on us to show up and stand up right now. This doesn’t just affect us; it affects the entire world. We need to let them know that fear will not live here.

—Ali Hanson is a psychiatrist and
neuroscientist who lives in Iowa City.

Protest sign at Iowa City #handsoff rally