“These are the times that try our democracy”

A Digger Paper

On the Summer Solstice 2025, at the Our Commons Are Free exhibit at Fort Mason in San Francisco, the Diggers distributed a new Digger Paper. It was a fan-fold booklet similar to a street zine. Here is the text and the images of each page.

Fellow citizens and netizens,

Our country stands on a knife’s edge. What was once a noble experiment to establish stable self-governance now teeters between farce and catastrophe. We are beset not by foreign tyrants but by domestic demagogues who wrap their ambition in the flag, speak of freedom while silencing dissent, and claim the mantle of the people while serving the wealthiest few.

Let it be plainly said:

A government that permits billionaires to purchase lawmakers, that rolls back voting rights while expanding corporate rights, that attacks science, justice, and truth—is no government by the people. It is a counterfeit of democracy.

The Founders warned us against monarchy, and yet we flirt again with rule by strongmen. We see courts stacked, laws twisted, and public trust sold off piece by piece to the highest bidder. This is not “politics as usual.” It is a campaign against the common good.

The crisis is not one man, but a system that shields the powerful and punishes the poor. A system where schools crumble and hospitals close while defense contractors and oil companies grow fat. Where the working majority is told to tighten belts as billionaires blast themselves into space.

The hard-won victories of the civil rights era are under siege. The right to vote—bought with the blood of Black Americans—is being hollowed out. Women’s autonomy is rolled back by courts that ignore precedent and scorn equality. And LGBTQ+ citizens, once emerging from the shadows of criminalization, now find their rights to healthcare, expression, and even existence debated anew. What was once enshrined as progress is now dismissed as excess. This backlash is no accident. It is a calculated effort to reverse the freedoms that millions marched, fought, and died to secure.

The earth itself is under assault. Protections fought for by generations—clean air, safe water, wild lands preserved for all—are stripped away for short-term profit. Polluters are rewarded, climate science denied, and natural disasters met with indifference or opportunism. The sacred balance between humanity and the planet is treated as collateral damage in the pursuit of endless extraction. This is not progress. It is plunder. And it leaves our children a diminished world—hotter, harsher, and more unjust.

And where immigrants—who labor in our fields, care for our children, and enrich our culture—are demonized, detained, and deported in the name of fear. The promise etched at the base of the Statue of Liberty is betrayed daily by policies of cruelty and exclusion.
Is this the liberty we were promised?

Let us return to first principles.

No monarchy.
No ruler above the law.
No government without the consent of the governed.
No justice denied because of wealth, race, gender, or belief.

We need not accept corruption as fate. We need not live under permanent emergency, culture war, or oligarchic rule. Power can be reclaimed. The soul of a nation is not for sale.

We must declare independence from cynicism. From fear. From lies. And affirm again our allegiance—to democracy, to community, to truth, and to one another.

Do not wait for saviors.

Be the revolution.

Join the movement to rebuild the Republic—free, fair, and for all.
Now is the time. Not later.

Not after the next election.

NOW.

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”— Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

Cover image: Thomas Paine, a corset maker from England, immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1774 at a moment of rising revolutionary fervor. His 1776 pamphlet Common Sense laid out a plainspoken argument against monarchy and for democratic self-rule. Published at a time of low morale, it became an instant sensation, electrifying the spirit of resistance that resulted in the Declaration of Independence six months later. By the end of the Revolutionary war, one in five Americans owned a copy of Paine’s catalytic essay.