After No Kings: A Conflicted Response (Part 1)
On Saturday, June 14th, I attended St Paul’s No Kings rally– but not without serious misgivings. I had learned via activists on social media that 50501, the organizers of the rally, have somewhat suspicious origins, having emerged seemingly out of nowhere with no clear activist lineage or connection to other movements. This, combined with 50501’s cooperation with police, funding by a Walmart heiress, and aspects of their messaging, made me apprehensive as I headed out that bright morning. Yet, I went. I’ve become somewhat skeptical of Instagram activists over the past few months, unable to tell when their admonishments are necessary and when they are simply symptomatic of political puritanism, and I figured the best way to gauge would be to attend and see for myself. Besides, I had the day off, and it was better than doomscrolling through images of Trump’s ego parade.
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Throughout my hour-long bus ride, my mind wandered to the violent civil unrest going on throughout the country, both in my home turf of LA and in my adopted city, where just that Tuesday protesters had driven away ICE agents by throwing furniture and trash cans. I’m a believer in the necessity of this kind of direct action, and watching it had given me some hope that even as the tide of fascism is rising, the people too are rising to meet it. I wondered what the relationship was between that unrest and the carefully-organized peaceful demonstration I was headed to.
My bus quickly began to fill with other rally attendees, many of them toting American flags. It confused me how any progressives, having studied the genocidal origins of the United States, could still believe in that flag. I had a feeling this was not the place for me. That impression was confirmed when I finally reached the rally and found myself surrounded by older white people with more flags, white street vendors selling mass-manufactured protest merch, and even a few pink pussy hats, a garment that has become synonymous with milquetoast liberal feminism. Where many of the protests I’d attended in the past set the mood by blasting political rap, the speakers at No Kings played what I can best describe as Divorced Mother Pop: “inspirational” songs by Kelly Clarkson, Selena Gomez, and the like.
I was almost considering turning back when I spotted a pair of masked protesters in black bloc, one of them carrying a trans flag. Other punks. I joined up with them, and we quickly began gathering other visibly trans and visibly radical attendees into our pod.
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The start of the march was delayed as the organizers frantically adjusted for events unfolding in nearby Brooklyn Park. By that time, the news had broken of Representative Melissa Hortman’s assassination— in fact, some attendees had had time to make signs in tribute to her and her husband. The assassination, and the knowledge that police had found a “No Kings” flyer in killer Vance Boelter’s car, injected tension into the air. We were all worried that gathering in such a huge group had made us sitting ducks.
The program for the day was truncated as a result. One friend who I recognized at the march had mentioned a skit she was participating in onstage— a skit that never happened. I learned later that Governor Tim Walz had been planned to speak once we reached the Capitol, but having found his name on Vance Boelter’s hit list, he was lying low. When the speeches started, an organizer dedicated our march to the Hortmans. She then led us in a “Say Her Name” chant for Melissa Hortman. The “Say Her/His/Their Name” chant was created to honor civilians (originally Black women) murdered by police, who are treated as disposable by the state and whose murders and memories are often obscured by cover-ups. I have no desire to disrespect Hortman or any ill will towards her family, but she simply was not the right person to apply this chant to. As a public figure in a position of relative power, she is not at real risk of having her name forgotten. I would have welcomed a more appropriate way of honoring her, but I felt uncomfortable with this one.
A speaker instructed the crowd to raise their American flags high and wave them proudly. I waved my keffiyeh. She told us that criticizing our government was the most sincere form of patriotism, that we were representative of true democracy, that we were taking back what America stands for. I looked around to see banners bearing “We the People” and quotes from Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. There were protesters dressed as colonial soldiers and even a giant papier-mâché Benjamin Franklin head. Perhaps I should have expected this Revolutionary War imagery, given the name of the event. But I was struck by the cognitive dissonance of it all: using Jefferson and Franklin, who owned slaves, and Hamilton, who assisted in the sale of slaves, as representatives of freedom; reiterating throughout the day that this movement was committed to non-violence and peace, while leveraging the symbols of a war.
Later, after processing, I came to understand the purpose of this symbolism, and in fact the purpose of the entire rally. Trump’s re-election had shaken liberals’ belief in America as a land of freedom and equality, and the main goal of No Kings was to salvage that myth. When leftists had described the march as “existing to make people feel good”, this had not seemed like a particularly strong critique to me. When leftists scoff at “feeling good”, they often scoff at hope, joy, and other emotions that are just as necessary to resistance as anger and grief. But in this case, what they had meant by “feeling good” was preserving blissful ignorance, and they were right to say so. “No Kings” and its patriotism kept the narrative of American specialness comfortably intact.
I want to take a moment, while I’m here, to digress (although it really isn’t a digression) about the visuals of the protest, because even those not entrenched in Americana imagery supported this narrative of comfort. The signs, costumes, and papier-mâché puppets were all quite elaborate and meme-worthy. This is not in and of itself an issue; I love protest art, and there’s nothing wrong with a little humor and levity. But this felt like I had walked into a costume contest. It felt like pageantry.
Much has been written about the intellectual snobbery of the left, whether the bourgeois smugness of liberals or the theory pedantry of radicals (Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Daniel Denvir have a particularly good breakdown of this in Hammer and Hope.) This elitism alienates working-class and rural Americans from leftist politics and reinforces the idea that conservatism is “for the people” (despite all the evidence that it props up billionaires.) Witnessing the pageantry of retirees with time and money to do arts-and-crafts reminded me of this issue. Creating a fake taco cart to evoke “TACO trade theory”, dressing up as a clown to call Trump a clown, puns like “No faux king way!” all struck me as wit for the sake of looking witty, rather than effective political messaging. But maybe that was my own leftist elitism shining through.
What troubled me more was how insubstantial the politics of these slogans were. Very few people, it seemed, wanted to represent any ideals or agenda beyond “Trump Bad.” A lot of signs mocked Trump for being orange and having small hands— jokes that got old sometime in early 2017 and have gotten less funny with each passing year. Others, bafflingly, called for his impeachment, which has already happened multiple times and was not effective in stopping him. But one sign that made my blood boil, a sign that I stood behind for most of the speeches at the Capitol, read in pink sparkly letters, “If Kamala Had Won, We Would All Be At Brunch.” Speak for yourself, I thought. If I wondered where these people had been the past five years to have politics that seemed cryogenically frozen in the 2010s, that sign was my answer.
Based on the messaging at this rally, all the ills of American politics could be reduced to one man and a handful of his cronies like Elon Musk. Saving a virtuous, mythic America was as simple as getting that one man out of office again, and hopefully getting another person of color in. There were no systems to dismantle, no founding myths to unlearn, no self-reflection to be done.
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We finally started our walk to the Capitol building, and we did so in bewildering silence. In almost all of the protests I have been to, we spend the march chanting at the top of our lungs. These chants are embedded with our demands— “Disclose, divest/ We will not stop, we will not rest.” “Hey hey/ Ho ho/ These racist cops have got to go.” But the marshals of this rally were hesitant to start any chants. Those they did start were vague and demand-less, to the point that I cannot fully remember them. The one that caught on most consistently was “No kings!” but this also fizzled out quickly. My pod and I took it upon ourselves to supply our own chants, some of which were enthusiastically answered by the crowd, and some of which quickly died out. I could hear other small scatterings of chants throughout the long, winding crowd, and I wished we could have gotten organized enough to keep something going. The energy of an estimated 30,000 people chanting together would have been electric.
Reaching the Capitol, I found myself behind that goddamn Kamala sign, and a member of the pod pointed out a Gadsden flag to our left. Its bright yellow presence simultaneously felt like an incursion and made perfect sense. To our right, I spotted an anarchist flag, and, to my surprise, tables where Democratic Socialists and Freedom Road Socialist Organization were distributing literature. I was quite literally in the middle of all of this, surrounded by this incongruous march and its precarious, perhaps nonexistent, group identity.
There was a lot of chatter around me, so it’s difficult to give an accurate account of what this second batch of speeches were like. I know that much of the previously-planned material was scrapped in order to pay tribute to Representative Hortman, with one speaker comparing her assassination to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It’s been widely reported on social media that one of the speakers thanked the police for “keeping us safe.” I didn’t catch this, but I also don't dispute it. Yet, this same block of speakers contained the most genuine and refreshing message of the entire event. When poet-activist Guante (Kyle Tran Myhre) mounted the podium in a lavender “Protect Trans Kids” shirt to recite his poem “No kings, all bricks,” he spoke words I had been dying to hear all day, truth I had been aching to hear breathed into this space:
The ancestor on my shoulder doesn’t tell me to put the brick down, or that the weight isn’t worth it. I’m sure many of you are familiar with that… heaviness, whether guilt, or grief, or just the daily shipwreck of the news, all this information we already know:
How things are bad. How they’ve always been bad for some of us, and how shining a light on the bad thing doesn’t change it… but can be a first step. How a big march like this can be a first step, but is never a destination. How going “back to normal” is going backwards. And how desperately the cowards in power want you going backwards, want you to put that brick down, want you to focus on your job, make money—focus on your family.
But I don’t have a family without immigrants and refugees. The word family means nothing to me when it doesn’t include trans people. The word community means nothing when it doesn’t include people with disabilities. Words like justice, peace—they are empty when they don’t include Palestinians. There are no billionaires on my block, no kings welcome in my grandmother’s kitchen. Her voice, a beacon: don’t you dare put that brick down. Not yet.
There it was, finally. Recognition that the issues are systemic and bigger than one man, recognition of interlinked struggles against oppression (including that of Palestine, which often goes unaddressed in liberal spaces), specific calls to action, and even, later in the poem, a shoutout to the civil unrest that had protected our neighbors from ICE earlier that week. When I listened to Guante, I felt for the first time like I was actually at a protest. Did anyone around me feel it too?
