About Me

In January 2025 I was like many Americans. Unsure and deeply concerned at just how bad the second Trump administration was going to be. I could not have predicted then just how far our nation was going to fall, how many privileges we once considered to be rights would be taken away and how many of our “leaders” on both sides of the aisle would be complicit in these egregious actions.

When my story came out after I was fired for refusing to remove my pronouns from my email when working for the State of Texas, there were a few things I wanted to be made clear that got a little lost in the mix. First, I loved every minute working with the extraordinary group of people at my state agency. I worked with a diverse group of proud Texans and Americans whom all had beautiful stories and lives that I was grateful to be able to learn about. The second is that I never intended to become an activist when I refused to follow my bosses orders. My only intention was to make it known that our gubernatorial office was playing politics with loyal employees and putting his constituents on the chopping block for no other reason than to kowtow to his far-right donors and his presidential overlord.

It’s been nearly 10 months since I was fired only days into the second Trump administration. Many others have lost their jobs, some doing it in more public and spectacular a fashion, standing up for what’s right, refusing to go along with these new and manufactured narratives. Many people have also lost far more than a job. Lives have been lost both domestically due to cruel policies and across the globe due to our cuts to USAID. Families have been shattered and rights trampled on by the new American Gestapo either assaulting them on the streets or sending them to camps with no intention of ever returning them.

Rescue Patriotism is a movement designed to allow us to once again speak with full lungs. For years we have been stymied by the shame and the exhaustion that comes from believing that wanting better for our country somehow means fighting our country. We have allowed the far-right to convince not just themselves but us as well that we cannot get what we want because that would mean working against the system. However, if there is one small silver lining of the two Trump administrations it is the realization that a government is a reflection of its people and if the people want something the government will move to accommodate it. They have changed the very nature of our democracy in 10 months and all it took was them believing in their movement with more conviction than we believed in ours. 

Well, no longer. Together we will shout with one voice that we are the true patriots. We will remind them that every era of American accomplishment was preceded by vast social changes and investments in the people, not in corporations. We will reclaim not just the rights that we have lost but the ones that were never given because we are striving for a more ideal future than our past. And we will maintain the critical thinking skills to acknowledge that just because our system is inequitable by design, it is still that same system that we can use, gifted to us by the founding figures of our nation, to make the most radical improvements to our country since The New Deal and the expansion of the American middle class.

Keep wearing your beliefs with pride,

Keep striving for better,

Frank Zamora (He/Him)

Owner, Rescue Patriotism