We are in the midst of one of the most dangerous periods in our nation’s history. It calls for all lovers of democracy to step up with a level of engagement heretofore not known to most.

The next month will be critical, as voting is already underway for crucial midterm elections that culminate on Election Day, Nov. 8, barely a month away.

There are sinister machinations of anti-democratic forces now in play at all levels here and abroad, and the only way they can be thwarted is by an unprecedented effort to get out the vote, an option we still have, but maybe not for that much longer.

Our enemy operates at all levels. What they all share in common is a hatred of democracy, and they are in an activist mode to undo our democracy as soon as possible. It is a devil’s shared compact from Putin to Xi to the pro-Trump elements in domestic politics from school boards to senators to media influencers.

It includes a roadmap for subverting many of the institutions we have taken for granted in our elections until the last year or so. Trump’s effort to cheat and lie about the 2020 election outcome and the subsequent attempted cancellation of the result with a mass riot at the Capitol January 6, 2021, are now manifesting a full court press around the U.S. of efforts to intimidate, lie and seek ploys to undermine how election outcomes are handled.

Consider what kind of shape we’d be in now if Trump had remained in the White House after losing the popular vote by over seven million in November 2020. Not only would that wide margin in favor of Joe Biden have been canceled out, disenfranchising every American voter, no matter who he or she voted for, but Trump staying in office would have paved the way for Putin to walk into Ukraine effectively unchallenged.

A Trump win would have set in motion an expansionist escalation of Russia by Putin, driven by a horridly racist and anti-democratic national ideology he’s embraced from his principal “spiritual advisor,” the arch-feudal, western and democracy-hating Alexander Dugin. All of western Europe would have been in immediate peril and engaged in feverish efforts to allay more Russian aggression, while from the U.S. would have come nothing, no resistance but a new “America First” dogma that would have left Europe alone and completely vulnerable.

It was only when it appeared clear that Trump would not hold onto power here that Putin was compelled to go with “Plan B,” a direct invasion of Ukraine without the U.S. presidency in his pocket. So now he has been faced by the West, overall, with a fierce resistance that is now moving to slap him with a monumental defeat.

Still, on the U.S. side, the fight is far from over. Just as it was an amazing mobilization of the freedom-loving American people in 2020 that threw the monkey wrench in the Putin/Trump plan, so it is up to us again this fall to push this menace back even further, to deny it any substantial access to the corridors of power in this country.

The anti-democrats in the U.S., aka Trumpians, hope to get their way with a series of critical election victories that will enable them to block legitimate voting results going forward. They hope to use what will be more heinous rulings by the Trumpian U.S. Supreme Court coming up in its session to give state legislators the power to overturn voting results and to expand on the anti-Roe V. Wade decision of last summer to not only hamstring every woman in the nation, but also those seeking to utilize the nation’s history of expanding support for human rights.

This Supreme Court will decimate laws protecting minorities, from Dreamers to LGBTQ persons, and further enfranchise those violent dogs of tyranny from within our very midst.

Putin’s Red Square speech earlier this week, in the context of his fantasy-driven fake annexation of four Ukraine territories, dripped with vile hatred for the kind of diversity that is the hallmark of our democracy, sadly akin to what so many Trumpians also contend here.

This is one big enemy that we are faced with, and we will defeat it with our mobilization to get out our votes for the next six weeks.