On Saturday, I plan to attend a Families Belong Together protest. You can find your nearest one here.

If you are at all capable of attending, please do.

Because make no mistake: we in the United States are currently under the aegis of a white supremacist government. Not one that is merely bigoted (“merely”), not one that’s politically incorrect. A government that is morally incorrect. A government that thinks it’s being generous when it says, fine, we’ll keep the children with the parents when we incarcerate brown people for taking the Statue of Liberty at her word.

White supremacist. There is no more accurate label.

And the Republican Party is openly, unabashedly, even proudly the party of white supremacy. #NotAllRepublicans? It doesn’t matter anymore. Right now, support for the Republican Party is support for its white supremacist agenda. It doesn’t matter if you try to asterisk that part and say you opt out; they don’t give a shit. They’re still getting what they want out of that transaction. If you can honestly say the same, then either you support white supremacy, or you’re willing to accept it in order to get what you do want. And there’s not nearly as much daylight between those two things as you might like to believe.

This isn’t hyperbole. Various countries have gone down this path before; it is the path of genocide. The fact that we haven’t gotten that far yet doesn’t mean we aren’t headed in that direction. And we aren’t even at the top of the path — we passed that quite a while ago. When you throw due process out the window, when you start incarcerating people wholesale, when you start tearing children away from parents and inflicting lifelong trauma on them, you’re halfway to the bottom.

We have to turn around. Not at the midterm elections; now. March in the streets. Call your officials. Is there a “Trump hotel” near you? Picket it. And then get ready for those midterms, because we need to democracy so fucking hard at these people that there’s no way they can steal the election without resorting to corruption so blatant even our usual apathetic electorate won’t stand for it.

The blogger Slacktivist pointed out the other day that Abraham Lincoln talked of the United States as being a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” We are the people. We are the government. Jess Sessions’ twisted quoting of Biblical scripture gets it wrong; he thinks we the people owe our unquestioning obedience to our elected officials. It’s the other way around. They serve us. They serve at our sufferance.

And we will not suffer this. Enough people have suffered already.