Over the weekend, I gathered with thousands of people from every corner of this nation for ‘Remove the Regime,’ a rally calling for the impeachment, conviction, and removal of Donald Trump.If you couldn’t be with us, you can see the full event here:

Here are the words I shared from the podium…

Good afternoon, America.

My name is John Pavlovitz, and I come to you from Raleigh, North Carolina.

I’m grateful to be here today, but I need to tell you that I am not well, my friends. I am sick today.

I’m sick to my stomach of Constitutional crises, of human rights atrocities, and acts of treason.

I’m sick of my Latino and immigrant neighbors being indiscriminately and violently assaulted by masked thugs.

I’m sick of food being taken from the mouths of hungry children,

I’m sick of people having to choose between paying their mortgage or their medical bills.

I’m sick of my LGBTQ neighbors being persecuted for simply existing.

I’m sick of people of color being gerrymandered out of the political process

I’m sick of women having to travel to another state just to have autonomy over their own bodies

I’m sick of the reality that the greatest border crisis we face is the one separating Church and State.

I’m sick of desperately appealing to public servants to do the decent, humane, and legal thing and seeing them again flatly refuse.

Are you sick of this all too?

And it’s not just we who are gathered here today who are sickened. This entire nation is not well, because in the highest position of leadership, we have one of the most amoral, lawless, vile, hateful human beings to ever walk the planet; a man devoid of decency, bereft of empathy, and allergic to truth. For a decade, he has been a pervasive moral cancer feeding off the body of our Republic: trafficking in tribalism, stoking division, pillaging its resources, preying upon the vulnerable, and inciting people to revel in the worst of their instincts.

Now, I don’t know a lot about medicine, but what I do know is that when a body is afflicted with cancer, you do everything you can to remove it. You don’t simply let it destroy everything around it without resistance. You don’t allow the malignancy to metastasize unimpeded. You don’t give it carte blanche for two years to ravage whatever is in its path and hope for the best.

For the sake of preserving life, you move heaven and earth to get the cancer out.

We gather here today to say that for the sake of the health and existential life of our great nation, and the well-being of our planet, Donald Trump must be removed.

And just so Right-wing media doesn’t twist this, let me say that, unlike the president’s supporters who gathered here on January 6th and so many times since then, we assemble here as a non-violent people in a non-violent movement. We seek a peaceful, legal, Constitutional remedy to this national heart sickness, and it comes in the form of impeachment, conviction, and removal—and this is what we are demanding today. We must get this cancerous president out.

And to my Conservative friends, this is your fight, too. We are tethered together in one interdependent community; our destinies are intertwined because we are all closer to being beggars than billionaires. You need to understand that we aren’t just in this for ourselves. We are for you, which is why we oppose him, because you are not immune to the destruction he is sowing and the damage he is doing any more than we are. Your elemental freedoms and liberties are being taken away as well. You, too, are losing access to education, security, and opportunity. Your children and grandchildren are also facing a future that is less safe, less compassionate, and less free. The sovereignty of our nation is in the balance in these moments, and with every day of inaction, the cancer takes more of what we might never get back.

As long as this president is allowed to remain, our nation will never be well, and we so easily could be well. It could all be so very simple. Impeachment, prosecution, removal. And once he is gone, we can come to the table for meaningful conversations on the challenges we face, find our commonalities, navigate compromise, and once again lean on the systems our Constitution put in place to work for the common good.

And that is why we stand on this hallowed ground today, to bring the healing that can only come once the historic malignancy of this president is removed.

For our Latino and immigrant neighbors, we need to get the cancer out.For survivors of sexual assault, we need to get the cancer out.For our beloved queer neighbors, we need to get the cancer out.For people living in food scarcity and at the edge of poverty, we need to get the cancer out.For Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus, Agnostics, and Atheists, we need to get the cancer out.For the vulnerable, the oppressed, the marginalized, the sick, and the hungry, we need to get the cancer out.For Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, we need to get the cancer out.For Conservatives, Moderates, and Liberals, we need to get the cancer out.

For the America that could be, we need to get the cancer out.

We must impeach, convict, and remove Donald Trump, and then we can get well.We will get America well.We will all be well.

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