By Thomas K. Pendergast

Instead of presidential cage fights, on June 14, the Sunset Commons café on Irving Street hosted a “watch party” of an event celebrating the First Amendment, joining more than 1,500 such gatherings with an estimated one million people across all 50 states.

The local event was organized by Westside Forward, founded a year ago to build grassroots power through community engagement, collective action and advocacy. 

Actress Jane Fonda and a resurrected Committee for the First Amendment organized “Rise Up, Sing Out: A Concert for the First Amendment,” a live event of singing and speeches to celebrate the First Amendment at The Town Hall in New York City, which was founded by suffragists who fought to pass the 19th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, establishing women’s right to vote. 

The event was also promoted by the national Indivisible organization. 

The musicians and speakers were a mix of big-time Hollywood celebrities, political commentators, activists, poets and authors like Robert De Niro, Julia Roberts, Bette Midler, Lily Gladstone, Maggie Tokuda-Hall, Patti Smith, Tessa Thompson and LaTosha Brown among many others.

The original Committee for the First Amendment was formed in September 1947 by screenwriter Philip Dunne, actress Myrna Loy, film directors John Huston and William Wyler to support the Hollywood Ten during the hearings of the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC).

“The threat is not coming, friends, it is here,” said Joy Reid, a former MSNBC host who now has her own podcast and YouTube channel. “Brendan Carr, the man who wrote the blueprint to dismantle the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) in Project 2025 is now running it. 

“He is weaponizing the agency to bully and control the press and suppress the wider televised media.

“This is corporate media on its knees,” Reid explained from the stage in New York City. “A handful of billionaires consolidating global stations, newspapers, national networks, turning American journalism into what they hope will be a U.S. version of North Korea. They want us afraid. Trump wants us to shrink when he calls us stupid, piggy and when he screams in the face of women journalists.”

Leyla Yilmaz, 19, said she lives in the Inner Sunset and came to the watch party partly out of fear. 

“I’ve honestly been pretty scared since 2016 with the new administration,” Yilmaz said. “Growing up in this country like this, it’s scary and it makes me wonder where the country’s headed.”

But she said she found some comfort at the watch party, where more than 30 people gathered to see the event projected onto a big screen. 

“I’ve heard so many great stories about people fighting and changing the world,” she said. “Things like that have just really been inspiring to me and made me want to fight for the world I want to live in.

“It’s not really something I would have expected but I thought it was pretty amazing to see all the people that came out to it from all over the country. It made me very hopeful.”

When asked what she thought about Trump’s 80th birthday bash featuring cage fights, she said, “I didn’t hear about it, and I don’t care.”

Author Maggie Tokuda-Hall announced that she helped form Authors Against Book Bans, a coalition of more than 5,000 creators “all across the country, united under a single guiding principle: That it is not the government’s place to tell us what we get to read.”

“I think a lot of us, authors in general, were waiting for someone to come and save us. But it’s become clear no one is coming: not the politicians who are eager to sell out our trans siblings for political expedience, not the CEOs who stand to gain from privatizing the public good and certainly not our president, who is bent on gaining authoritarian powers through all the dumbest and cruelest means possible. 

“Together, we have accomplished and we have won so much. Because no one is coming to save us. And that’s OK. We are going to save us.”

Georgia Cleverley, 69, from Santa Fe, N.M., said she was in town to care for her daughter’s dogs while the family was on vacation when Indivisible sent her a link to the watch party, so she invited a local friend to go with her. 

“I think it’s so great whenever people get together and have a common goal of fighting for democracy,” Cleverley said. “I have children and grandchildren. I want them to have a world of true democracy and we’re losing it day by day.”

When asked about the presidential birthday party in Washington, D.C., she threw her head back and laughed. 

“I think it’s a huge waste of taxpayer money,” she said. “They are cutting health care. People can’t afford to eat. They can’t afford gas. And yet, we can spend millions and millions of dollars on fancy jets and cars and cage matches and arches and putting his name on everything he could possibly think of. We can’t take care of our own people? That’s ridiculous.”

Rene Bloch, 75, a Sunset District local, agreed. 

“It’s preposterous, completely. It’s just a total absurdity, just celebrating his birthday,” Bloch said. “There’s nothing about people or the country, just about him.”

He said he would rather spend his time at this watch party.

“I thought it was a great opportunity to be in community and be together with others with the same feelings and frustrations of where our country’s going and have kind of a spiritual, inspirational experience so we can work together and be motivated for the coming months,” he said. “Rather than typically hearing from politicians, you know, it’s just kind of old but this is more uplifting.”

Actress Lily Gladstone, a member of both the Blackfeet and Nez Perce nations, noted that while many people talk about being in “unprecedented” times, for the indigenous people there is plenty of precedence. 

“This may feel unprecedented. You may think ‘how did we get here?’” Gladstone said. “For the first peoples of this land, unfortunately, this has been ongoing since the birth of this country as we know it today.

“So perhaps the question is not ‘how did we get here?’ It’s ‘how are we still here?’ And, maybe more importantly, how do we move forward?”

Community and political organizer LaTosha Brown offered up a goal for moving forward.

“It is time, family, to go to higher ground,” Brown said. “We have to go beyond seeing ourselves just as citizens of this nation. We have to start seeing ourselves as the architects and the founders of the next America: a new America where children will not go hungry, where our poor will not be discarded, where our brothers and sisters of every race will see their humanity; that we are not supporting a genocide, that we will not allow our elections to go and be stolen, where the value of human life is over everything, including money, wealth and land.

“Because we, the people, have a God-given right to create an America that we desire and that we deserve. Let’s build a family. We are the light-bearers of a nation that has yet to exist.”