Thank you all for coming out. It’s so easy to feel frightened and alone in these times, but clearly none of us is alone and we are stronger together.
I am Maura Mandyck, and I am a teacher and a librarian. In fact, I will have been a librarian for 25 years in August of this year. So you will not be surprised to hear that I am passionately in favor of information, of data, of facts, of reality, and of truth.
And almost all of the injustices and cruelties being inflicted on us right now by Donald Trump and his enablers have this in common: they are an outrage against the truth.
Stick with me, because we’re gonna get a little wonky.
It is not true that DOGE is saving anybody any money. The truth is that DOGE has already had to modify or remove more than 1,000 entries on its list of so-called savings (Hayes) because they are pretty much making it up as they go, or they don’t even understand what they’re doing! Because it is also true that they fired nuclear safety experts and the people trying to contain the bird flu outbreak (Alexander), as well as “accidentally” cutting ebola-prevention efforts managed by USAID (Emanuel).
It is not true that anyone other than a straight white man is a “DEI” hire and therefore unqualified. The truth is that Trump fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Charles Q. Brown, Jr., and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti, both of whom have long and illustrious military service records (Copp), but both of whom were targeted for the crime of being either Black or a woman.
And it is true that Trump has assembled the least-qualified and most outright bizarre collection of former Fox News personalities, pro-Putin shills, puppy killers, conspiracy theorists and criminals in the history of the United States to run our nation, to run it straight into the ground.
It is not true that immigration is bad for our country. The truth is that immigrants pay more in taxes over time than they use in government services and benefits (Gelatt), and that they boost gross domestic product and provide essential labor, not to mention that immigrants–like almost every single one of our ancestors–enrich this country with their cultures, their families, and their individual selves.
It is not true that Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are “entitlements,” at least not in the way they mean. The truth is that WE fund those programs, that our working lives and tax dollars are spent to provide for the elderly, the disabled and the impoverished right now with the promise that if we become disabled or impoverished and WHEN we become elderly, we will be provided for too.
And it is painfully and outrageously true that once someone has earned up to the income cap, which is $176,100, then that someone will pay not another cent in Social Security payroll taxes for the rest of the year. You and I pay these taxes all year, every year. Elon Musk reached the taxable income cap in the first few MINUTES of 2025 (Konish). All this talk of how we have to cut these entitlement programs could be ended by encouraging Mr. Musk to pay taxes, I don’t know, maybe into February?
It is not true that the January 6 rioters were very fine people, and it is also not true that this president or this republican party is on the side of law and order.
It is not true that tariffs will be good for our economy, and it’s not true that cryptocurrency is a good investment of taxpayer money, and is most definitely not true that Ukraine started the war with Russia! It is not true that the body of water out that way is the Gulf of America!
One of the funniest outrageous untruths the so-called president told recently is that he has “brought back free speech in America.” The truth is that Trump recently posted on “TruthSocial” (also: TruthSocial is not true) that “agitators on college campuses will be imprisoned\ or permanently sent back to the country from which they came,” and “American students will be permanently expelled or depending on the crime, arrested! NO MASKS!”
But what is not the least little bit funny is that this so-called president and his slavishly loyal and/or completely terrified followers will destroy this country in every way it can be destroyed if we do not stop them. It’s not going to be the Democratic party that does it, at least based on what we’ve seen so far. It will have to be the people. It will have to be people like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott at the Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848, and people like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, who helped lead the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969. It will have to be people like John Lewis, Amelia Boynton, Hosea Williams and some 600 or so civil rights activists who marched across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama 60 years and one day ago and were met with state-sponsored violence, but did not give up. My friends, it will have to be people like us.
And we need to arm ourselves with the truth. So in my self-appointed role of Official Librarian of the Revolution, haha, I am going to share a reading list. These are the texts, writers and podcasters that I have found essential to my thinking and to my coping in these times. I will share this list on the OurDayMobile facebook page and subreddit or you can scan the QR code on this sign to get to the list, which I will probably keep updating. I will also share my sources for everything I’ve said today.
Thank you for listening, for being here, and for being people like us, who will not quit.
Works Cited
Alexander, Peter, and Alexandra Marquez. “Trump administration wants to un-fire nuclear safety workers but can’t figure out how to reach them.” NBC News, NBC Universal LLC, 16 Feb. 2025, www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-administration-wants-un-fire-nuclear-safety-workers-cant-figure-rcna192345.
Copp, Tara, and Lolita C. Baldor. “Trump fires chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and two other military officers.” Associated Press, 21 Feb. 2025, apnews.com/article/trump-brown-joint-chiefs-of-staff-firing-fa428cc1508a583b3bf5e7a5a58f6acf.
Emanuel, Gabrielle. “Musk says work to stop Ebola was accidentally cut but restored. Experts raise doubts.” NPR, 27 Feb. 2025, www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/02/27/g-s1-50929/elon-musk-ebola-usaid.
Gelatt, Julia. “Explainer: Immigrants and the U.S. Economy.” Migration Policy Institute, Oct. 2024, www.migrationpolicy.org/content/explainer-immigrants-and-us-economy.
Hayes, Chris. “Elon Musk’s DOGE blunders are piling up.” MSNBC, MSNBC Cable LLC, 07 Mar. 2025, www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/elon-musk-trump-doge-errors-funding-rcna195161.
Konish, Lorie. “Million-dollar wage earners have already stopped paying into Social Security for 2025.” CNBC, CNBC LLC, 07 Mar. 2025, www.cnbc.com/2025/03/07/million-dollar-wage-earners-have-stopped-paying-into-social-security-for-2025.html.
Volenik, Adrian. “Report Says Elon Musk's Businesses Have Been Awarded $38 Billion In Government Contracts Since 2003. Here's What Taxpayers Are Funding.” Benzinga, 03 Mar. 2025, www.benzinga.com/news/25/03/44079465/report-says-elon-musks-businesses-have-been-awarded-38-billion-in-government-contracts-since-2003-heres-what-taxpayers-are-funding.