VIDEO: “When We March to Defend Our Right to Vote, We Are Marching Against War”
At the final Moral Monday event hosted by Repairers of the Breach in Washington, D.C. before the movement returns to the states, Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, delivered remarks at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church connecting the fight for voting rights to the fight against war, genocide, and the militarization of the federal budget.
“We are a nation at war,” Phyllis told the crowd. “Our leaders are spending our money and the lives of people around the world in a war that is not in our interest, is not being fought because we want it — although it is being fought in our name.”
She catalogued the scope of U.S. military violence since January 2025: “We have seen this government go to war, dropping bombs in countries from Somalia to Iraq to Venezuela to Iran, Nigeria — enabling the genocide in Palestine, and then coming back to bomb, with Israel, Iran again, and starting another war against the peoples of the Middle East.”
The human toll, she said, demands to be named: 3,375 civilians killed in Iran, 3,400 killed in Lebanon, more than 1,000 killed in Gaza since the most recent so-called ceasefire, and 18 U.S. soldiers dead. And the financial cost — now at $103 billion for the Iran war alone — represents a direct choice about what America values. “That $103 billion that we’ve paid so far could have been spent on 2.9 million public housing units for people that are unhoused, 2.9 million livable wage jobs for families with two children.”
On the military budget more broadly, Phyllis was direct: “The weapons don’t keep us safer. It makes war more likely.” She called for cutting the military budget in half — noting that at over $1 trillion, it has reached a level that demands accountability from every elected official in the country.
Her closing message tied it all together: “When we march to defend our right to vote, we are marching against war. We are marching against genocide, and we are marching for a new kind of world.”
The Repairers of the Breach Moral Monday movement will now return to the states for 100 days of marches to the polls across the country.
Watch Phyllis’ remarks below:
