I hope you’re going to attend one of the antiauthoritarian No Kings rallies Saturday. All the cool kids will be there.
Also, your cool grandmother. And your cool teacher. And maybe your cool dentist. And those cool infants and toddlers in strollers festooned with balloons or, better yet, inflatable animals in the style of the demonstrators in war-ravaged Portland. Maybe the kids’ cool parents will come sporting animal costumes.
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SUBSCRIBEAlso sure to show up are the cool and friendly government employees who are either being furloughed or laid off during the shutdown. This is a safe way — or not, depending on how many narcs and/or overflying drones the Trump administration has in place — for employees to publicly vent their frustrations.
You have only to look back at the June 14 No Kings rallies, which attracted millions across the country, to know that these rallies are pretty joyful events, even given the seriousness of the issues at stake. And the millions who protested in June were remarkably peaceful, a fact that MAGA world desperately wants you to forget.
I’m guessing the Saturday rallies will be even more joyful, even as the stakes grow ever higher and as Donald Trump, with the help of the Supreme Court and a compliant (read: craven) Republican Congress, flouts the Constitution from one end to the other.
All those interested in saving democracy from Trump’s authoritarian excesses, we’re told, are invited to the rallies. It’s the big-tent theory, as seen by those protesting Trump’s assaults on America as we used to know it. I mean, if there’s anything Americans would seem to agree on — as the rally organizers keep saying — it’s that the American revolution was about getting rid of tyrants. Who can be against that then or now?
Meanwhile, many Republican leaders in Washington are calling the No Kings rallies “hate America” events, led by antifa.
Except that antifa (standing for antifascist) is a bunch of loosely affiliated far-left activists with no set structure. And except that antifa can be better understood as an ideology — which is still legal by the way — than an actual organization with actual leaders.
And except that the U.S. has no domestic-terrorist laws on the books. And except that you know — as a reader who may also be marching this weekend — you don’t hate your country any more than your cool dentist does.
And to top it off, we’re left to assume that George Soros — who else? — is the principal funder of such events. He’s now being investigated as such, as if that were illegal. And so, we’re left to ponder whether your cool grandma could be a Soros plant who — God forbid — ends up somewhere in the gulag, especially if her skin color is brown or she’s heard speaking, you know, Spanish.
These rallies may partially shut down some cities for much of a day. That’s OK with me. There must be action, but let’s hope for no violence. In Colorado, at the last rally, most cities did mostly the right thing, holding back the police from being too confrontational. There were a few arrests in Denver when protesters tried to march onto I-25 to shut it down and were met by cops in riot gear firing pepper balls. If that’s the worst violence these so-called antifa mobs can muster, I think we’ll be all right.
In Colorado on Saturday, you’ll hardly be able to drive more than a few miles in any direction without bumping into a rally, in cities and towns big and small, blue and red, with radical Dems (read: liberals) and awakened (vs. woke) Trump voters on the march, diversity and inclusion of all kinds encouraged.
Do these rallies — which will draw millions and may well turn out to be the biggest set of rallies in American history — scare Trumpists?
You bet. You can see it by the reaction.
It’s an old trick — I remember it well from Nixon days — to call rallies critical of the government anti-American. In the late ’60s, we were told that the antiwar demonstrators were anti-American leftist activists who were useful idiots of the commies. Just replace communists with antifa and here we are nearly 60 years later. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, only incalculably worse.
Republicans have been scaremongering about antifa for years, but under Trump, they’ve pushed the rhetoric up to 11. (BTW, I haven’t seen the new Spinal Tap movie, because it would break my heart, and maybe my brain, to watch the critic-ravaged sequel).
First Trump signed an executive order designating antifa as a “domestic terrorism organization” that had “explicitly” called for the overthrow of the government. It asks that the government not only go after antifa, but “any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa.”
Seriously?
Can we get a link to the “explicit calls?”Antifa has been around for years, so why hasn’t the FBI broken the case? I know that Trump just blamed the “Biden FBI” for planting protesters at the January 6 attempt to force Congress to keep Trump in office. Of course, Trump was president at the time and had been for four years, so I’m not sure how the Biden FBI, which didn’t exist, played into that. Or did Trump simply misremember who was president at the time?
In any case, Trump recently called a pre-Oct. 16-rally antifa “roundtable,” with all the usual suspects in tow, to get to the heart of it all.
As the Bulwark’s JV Last points out, Trump moved the goalposts at the roundtable to include not only antifa but those “inspired by antifa,” which, I guess could mean anyone or, more likely, passingly few people.
Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson is saying that it’s “all the pro-Hamas wing and, you know, antifa people. They’re all coming out. … and it’s being told to us that (Democrats) won’t be able to reopen the government until after that rally because they can’t face their rabid base.”
Are you rabid? Are you antifa? Is your grandma really cool?
No Kings has its own website. You can find advice there on how to be nonviolent and how to react to any violence in your midst. It lists rally supporters. Surprisingly, antifa appears nowhere.
Instead there’s this from the website: “Now (Trump’s) doubling down — sending militarized agents into our communities, silencing voters, and handing billionaires giveaways while families struggle. This isn’t just politics. It’s democracy versus dictatorship. And together, we’re choosing democracy.”
As many have noted, if Saturday’s rally were actually being led by an organized antifa, wouldn’t Trump, who quells anti-government dissent wherever he or Steve Bannon spots it, have arrested the leaders on the charge of fomenting violence or, I don’t know, suggesting Trump is a dangerous clown?
Where are the arrests? Why aren’t the clampdowners actually clamping down? Why, for that matter, would MAGA world allow rallies supposedly led and financed by domestic terrorists to happen at all?
At the round table, Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem said they had arrested the girlfriend of an antifa founder at a Portland demonstration and that she hopes to prosecute her (but hasn’t yet) and learn “more and more information about the network and how we can root them out and eliminate them from the existence of American society.”
Why have we never heard of these founders? Does antifa have its own secret Mount Rushmore that Noem hopes to discover?
Look, I don’t think a rally of any size would change Trump’s mind on anything in particular. Which isn’t to say the rallies aren’t useful, or that they don’t help bring coalitions together to, say, win back the House in the midterm elections. Or that they don’t make an especially strong and unifying point.
The rallies are critical. But the truth is that the rallies are less about Trump than they are about us, the loyal-to-American-democracy, anti-Trump opposition. We need them desperately.
I was in Baltimore recently to visit some old friends — with the emphasis on old — I worked with at the Baltimore Sun 30 to 40 years ago. Some of them who had recently retired asked me why I hadn’t. The answer was easy. I can’t afford to retire — not because of the money, but because of my mental health.
My Colorado Sun columns allow me to vent about the ongoing crisis in America that may be the most dangerous in our lifetimes.
How could I give that up?
When I first started writing that people couldn’t afford to bury their heads in the sand after Trump was restored to the presidency, many asked me what they should do, and I admit I didn’t have any great answers. But now the answer is obvious. You protest and organize however you can. And the rallies are a big part of it.
The rallies bring community. They bring the certainty that however much you feel alone out there, you are not — not when you’re being joined by millions who feel much the same way. They allow you to escape the doom loop where the government wants to keep you trapped.
Trumpists want you to believe that there’s no escaping the Trump forces of masked snatch-and-grab ICE agents, or Trump’s use of the U.S. military and the Texas National Guard as a private police force, which he hopes to see “training” in our cities. They want you to believe that the press and the universities and Hollywood and college protesters are the real dangers to America, and not the person who treats his presidency as a personal revenge tour with a giant-sized enemies list.
The rally will feature many million voices loudly saying that we have a voice. And that, with that voice, we say we’re not doomed, and democracy — with hard work and some luck — can be saved.
These rallies inevitably remind me of the anti-Vietnam war rallies I participated in as a college student and later covered. And forgive me if my advice today on Saturday’s rallies leans a little heavily on ’60s nostalgia. But here it is, in brief:
Be there or be square, man.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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