Indivisible Riverside Public Page

It is not his reflecting pool. It is ours.

The Reflecting Pool has always belonged to us — the people — and it’s time we start acting like it.

Built in the early 1920s as part of a long‑term plan to turn what was once swamp and mudflats into a grand public space, the Reflecting Pool was designed to mirror our highest ideals back at us: democracy, accountability, and the unfinished work of justice. It has watched over generations of Americans pushing this country to be better, from Marian Anderson defying segregation in 1939 to the March on Washington and Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, when hundreds of thousands filled the Mall demanding civil rights.

But the pool hasn’t just belonged to presidents and history books — it’s belonged to regular people. Tourists who can’t resist dipping their feet on a scorching August day. Protestors wading in after hours of marching for civil rights, immigrant justice, LGBTQ+ liberation, abortion rights, and Black lives. Even the brave (and slightly reckless) souls who’ve tried to ice-skate across its thin winter skin, breaking the rules because they understand something deeper: this is our space. We paid for it. We maintain it. We fill it with meaning.

Now that same civic monument is ringed with armed National Guard, barricades, and cops ready to arrest people for daring to step too close — or to turn it into a backdrop for carefully curated social media photos while anyone who treats it like a living public space is treated like a criminal. The message is clear: they want the symbolism without the people, the monument without the movement.

We don’t have to accept that.

The Reflecting Pool is not a prop for politicians or a militarized photo op — it’s a public good funded by our tax dollars, a gathering place for everyone who believes this country can be more just, more equal, more free. We have a right to cool our feet in it, to organize by it, to march around it, to reclaim it as a place where the people — not the powerful — are centered.

Ouch 😂

Join Dems of Greater Riverside and the Young Dems of Riverside County for a casual Happy Hour!

Meet fellow Democrats, make new connections, and enjoy an evening of conversation and community.

Whether you're a longtime activist, a new volunteer, or just looking to connect with like-minded neighbors, everyone is welcome.

Food and drinks available for purchase.

RSVP or get more info: https://www.mobilize.us/cadems/event/974889/

There we go! That’s the ticket right there.

Thanks to the Universalist Unitarian Church of Riverside for hosting our watch party in Riverside. Thanks to the First Congregational Church of Riverside for allowing us to use their front walk for the amazing Coldwater Blues Club. We came together ain community to .

Rise Up, Sing Out: A Concert for the First Amendment…

On the eightieth birthday of the forty-seventh President of the United States, on a day the republic also set aside to honor its own flag, two very different visions of America competed for the national imagination. At the White House, a temporary cage was erected on the South Lawn for UFC Freedom 250, a mixed martial arts spectacle presented as a birthday tribute to Donald Trump and a preview of the country's two hundred and fiftieth anniversary.

Thousands of ticketed guests gathered on the grounds of the executive mansion to watch fighters square off for the president's amusement. Across the Hudson, in a very different room with a very different history, something else was happening. Something quieter. Something that has, in other eras, proven far more durable.

At the Town Hall in New York City, a century-old venue founded by suffragists in 1921 as a home for civic discourse and democratic expression, the Committee for the First Amendment presented Rise Up, Sing Out: A Concert for the First Amendment.

The ninety-minute event featured performances and appearances by some of the most recognizable names in American arts and culture: Jane Fonda, Robert De Niro, Bette Midler, Patti Smith, Rufus Wainwright, Sasha Allen, Joy Reid, Julia Roberts, Lily Gladstone, Wilson Cruz, Peppermint, Jenn Colella, Broadway Inspirational Voices, Rude Mechanical Orchestra, Singing Resistance, Kayla Davion, and the Reverend Adriene Thorne.

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The concert was free. It was streamed nationwide. Watch parties were organized in cities and towns across the country, in living rooms and community centers and public libraries, in states red and blue and everywhere in between. You did not have to buy a ticket to witness it. That was the point.

The Committee for the First Amendment is Jane Fonda's organization, launched in October with a founding statement signed by more than five hundred and fifty artists, writers, and cultural leaders who declared their intention to defend free expression against what they described as government repression and industry complicity. Fonda, eighty-eight years old and unambiguously clear-eyed about the stakes of this moment, made no effort to be polite about the reason the committee exists.

"This is our documentary moment," she told Reuters this week. "History is going to write about this, and I don't want to be on the side of people who said, 'Oh my God, things are so bad, what am I going to do?' No. I want to be out in the front." She appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to speak about tonight's event. She said music was "one of our most powerful weapons." She has been arrested before for her beliefs. She was not deterred then. She is not deterred now.

The performers who took the Town Hall stage tonight brought with them something that cage fights cannot manufacture and presidential birthdays cannot buy: moral authority rooted in craft. Patti Smith has been singing truth to power since the nineteen seventies. Bette Midler has spent five decades being fearlessly, hilariously, devastatingly honest about what she sees. Rufus Wainwright, one of the most gifted songwriter-performers of his generation, said of tonight's concert: "When this administration comes for our freedoms, music is how we remember who we are and what we're fighting for.

Rise Up, Sing Out is what this moment demands. So let's come together, raise our voices, and remind them exactly who this country belongs to." Joy Reid, one of the most incisive journalists working in American broadcast media, joined them. Academy Award-winning actress Julia Roberts and Oscar-nominated actress Lily Gladstone lent their voices and their presence to the evening. Broadway Inspirational Voices lifted the room. The Rude Mechanical Orchestra marched. Singing Resistance sang.

While all of this was happening, the White House was running its own production. UFC Freedom 250 brought four thousand ticketed guests to the South Lawn for what the administration billed as a celebration of American strength and the beginning of the America 250 anniversary commemorations. It is worth noting, without much commentary, that several artists originally announced for related America 250 programming have since quietly withdrawn.

Martina McBride said she had been told the event would be nonpartisan, and concluded that was not what was happening. Bret Michaels said the event had become more divisive than he expected. The Commodores stepped back. Young MC stepped back. The artists who remained on the government-sanctioned side of the evening did so with the full awareness that their names had become part of an argument. The ones who left made an argument of their own.

The No Kings Coalition, working in partnership with Indivisible and the Committee for the First Amendment, used tonight's concert as an anchor for a nationwide organizing day. This was not the first time they have tried to answer June 14th with something other than silence. Last year, on Trump's seventy-ninth birthday, No Kings demonstrations brought an estimated five million people into the streets of more than two thousand cities and towns across the country.

There were marches in October, and again in March. Tonight's approach was deliberately different. Organizers chose community over confrontation. Watch parties instead of marches. Food and music and neighbors. The emphasis was on connection, on the kind of civic tissue that holds a democracy together when institutional structures are under pressure. The No Kings movement has asked Americans to remember what kind of people they want to be. It is a harder question than it sounds.

The First Amendment, the specific text these artists gathered to celebrate, protects five freedoms: speech, religion, the press, peaceful assembly, and the right to petition the government. It was written by people who had lived under a government that did not recognize those freedoms and who understood precisely what their absence felt like. Tonight's organizers were direct about why those five protections feel urgent in this political moment. The administration has made no secret of its hostility toward an independent press.

Federal investigations have been shaped around political loyalties. Immigration enforcement has reached into communities in ways that chill speech and assembly. The courts have been the remaining check on some of the most aggressive exercises of executive power, and those courts are themselves under sustained political pressure. You do not have to accept any particular characterization of the current administration to look at that list and find a reason to show up.

Here is the thing underneath the thing. The Committee for the First Amendment is not a new idea. The original committee was formed in nineteen forty-seven, during the early years of the Red Scare, when the House Un-American Activities Committee was calling Hollywood artists to testify about alleged communist sympathies and studios were beginning to blacklist writers, directors, and actors based on their political associations. Henry Fonda, Jane's father, was among those who stood against the blacklist. The committee's founding members flew to Washington, D.C., to protest HUAC's overreach. They were dismissed as naive, as dangerous, as un-American.

Some of them were blacklisted anyway. Some of them lost years of their careers. The committee eventually dissolved under the pressure. What is being rebuilt tonight, in the same country, under some of the same strains, is the recognition that artists have always been among the first to understand when a government begins to confuse its own power with the people's sovereignty. Jane Fonda did not choose the Town Hall and she did not choose Flag Day and she did not choose her father's history by accident. The echoes in this room are intentional.

The White House press office described tonight's protest events as "Trump Derangement Therapy Sessions." That was the official response to an eighty-eight-year-old woman organizing artists in defense of the Constitution on the country's two hundred and forty-ninth birthday. Let the record reflect it. Let it sit where it belongs, in the file of statements made by people who have mistaken mockery for an argument.

The country is going to turn two hundred and fifty next month. There will be celebrations. There will be speeches. There will be arguments about what America is and what it was meant to be. What happened tonight at the Town Hall in New York City was one answer to that question. It was offered in song. It was offered for free. It was offered to anyone in the country who wanted to listen.

Rise Up, Sing Out. Not as a slogan. As a practice. As a form of remembering that the freedoms listed in the First Amendment are not self-enforcing. They require people who believe in them enough to stand up and say so, publicly, at some cost, in rooms that were built for exactly this purpose. Tonight, in a century-old hall founded by women who were not yet allowed to vote, that is precisely what happened. The artists came. The people watched. America, at least this version of it, sang.