After No Kings: A Conflicted Response (Part 2)

For Part 1, see my previous post.

The program ended soon after Guante finished, or at least it felt like it. People had already started leaving in droves while the speeches were going, but considering the ongoing manhunt, I couldn’t blame them. Past protests had often been followed up by radicals splitting off to light fireworks and sparklers, lead more aggressive chants, or organize future civil disobedience. I dragged my feet on the way to the bus stop, hoping to encounter a group like this, but found mostly clumps of families taking group photos with their signs, or phone cameras being indiscriminately waved to capture the crowd, which I had to duck to keep my face out of. About a block from the Capitol, I ran into a friend distributing literature for Socialist Alternative. I asked if they were aware of any other actions happening that day, but they hadn’t heard of any. It was humid,  we had marched through lunchtime, my phone was nearly dead, and I had an hour-long bus ride to look forward to. My new friends had left early, and I was beginning to think that the protest had accomplished nothing but getting me very sweaty.

I gained a new perspective, however, as I caught up with social media on my ride home. Images flowed in from city after city of seas of people who had shown up. 200,000 in LA. 50,000 in NYC. 10,000 in Dallas. Even towns embedded in deeply red states brought small but proud contingents to an estimated 5 million total protesters. This, compared to Trump’s reported 250,000 spectators– a number which, being supplied by the egotist himself, is likely inflated. A relative posted that, “for the first time in a long time,” she felt a sense of hope about the country. I felt a glimmer of it, too.

There is an efficacy to peaceful protests. Their uses are different from, and cannot be a replacement for, the uses of direct action. On Tuesday, my neighbors had actively prevented ICE from doing their job of disappearing vulnerable people without due process. On Saturday, we had created a visual representation of just where the will of the people lay, and that is vital to morale. If an undocumented person hiding in their home saw these enormous crowds on TV and felt less alone in their fear, felt reassured that there really are people on their side, dayenu. If the child of conservatives saw these protests and was emboldened for the first time to speak against how they were raised, dayenu. If a political apathetic wondered what all the fuss was about and finally began to ask questions, dayenu. Hope, joy, consolation and inspiration are as essential to life as food and water, and they are certainly scarce these days. This is the “feeling good” that I will always be in support of. Anger, fear, and grief can propel us for a time, but they are not a sustaining, renewing force. It is the right kind of “feeling good” that allows us to keep living through and fighting against the horrors.

A second use of peaceful protest is that it serves as an entry point into further action. Peaceful protests are where activists link up, form connection and community through shared experience, and get plugged in. The presence of DSA, FRSO, and Socialist Alternative at the march gave me hope that this goal had been achieved. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from leftist micropolitics, it’s that there is certainly drama and discourse surrounding some or all of the organizations I’ve named, and I am not well-informed enough to weigh in on it here. What’s relevant to me is how many Americans, particularly of the older crowd, are terrified of the word “socialism”. It’s possible that this rally was their first encounter with socialists outside of propaganda. For people invested in the mythology of America and capitalism, seeing radical politics represented alongside causes they already support could be an important inroad.

In this way, the political hodgepodge that I recognized at the march was a double-edged sword, and it reflects a larger tension currently facing the left. I have been wrestling for the past several months with June Jordan’s statement in On Call: Political Essays, that “only evil will collaborate with evil,” and how it coexists with the necessity of coalition building. On the one hand, the presence of Gadsden flags, anarchist flags, and American flags side by side betrayed the fact that the march stood for very little besides a shared opposition to Trump. And because there was no unifying political vision, no demands could be made, no goals could be set, and no strong statements could be made. It fell very much in line with the Democratic Party’s strategy of trying to play both sides. A major criticism of Kamala Harris’ campaign was its insistent attempts to court centrists and Never-Trump Conservatives, going as far as to partner with Liz Cheney and sing the praises of the U.S. military. This alienated leftists, who felt insulted that the Democratic Party was, to put it crassly, serving them shit and expecting them to eat it out of desperation. Leftists predicted that wealthy liberals and centrists left to their ignorant bliss would get Harris elected and then disappear to brunch for the next four years, leaving any systemic change completely unaddressed.

On the other hand, numbers matter. A conservative at an anti-Trump rally is one less conservative hanging on the dictator’s words. I don’t generally believe in expending much energy trying to move federal-level conservatives/centrists/liberals left, but that kind of political shift happens on the level of ordinary citizens every day. I should know, having grown up conservative. And it would happen a whole lot more if leftists didn’t belittle people for not being theory experts, lash out at good-faith questions, or excommunicate individuals and entire organizations for not meeting a standard of perfection.

As novelist Sarah Thankam Mathews writes in the thot pudding article “every day is all there is,” the way political spaces make people feel matters a whole lot in determining whether people will join them. Conservatives continue to be a vast and united force because their spaces make people feel smart and virtuous and important. Leftists, meanwhile, struggle to recruit because not only is our rhetoric inaccessible to anyone who hasn’t taken a college-level course on Marxist theory, but— like the droves of leftists who sat out the presidential election entirely, and like so many organizations absent from the No Kings rally— many will simply refuse to show up and be associated with the politically “impure”. The same woman who warned against collaborating with evil also preached against creating narrow definitions of who is “evil” and who is not.

In an Instagram reel responding to Saturday’s protests, trauma educator Jemarc Axinto asked a simple and pointed question to leftists who painted the No Kings rallies as pointless: where were you? What were you doing to confront the rolling of Trump’s tanks? I asked the same thing as I lingered at the rally, waiting for leftists to offer me something, anything. If the liberal impulse is towards ineffectual performance art, then a common radical leftist impulse is towards doing nothing out of fear of imperfection— and then complaining that nobody is doing anything. But this doesn’t always have to be the case. The organizers of Minneapolis People’s Pride and the Taking Back Pride march don’t just post critiques of the corporatization of Pride; they organize workable alternatives that make people want to keep being in community with them. But in instances when leftists complain from the stands while refusing to offer a practical alternative, what right do they have to shame the people who actually stepped into the arena?

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Another sign that the protests mattered is, bitterly, the violence that conservatives met them with. The assassinations/attempted assassinations in my city are the most obvious examples. At Nashville’s rally, Elijah Millar, a young man reportedly fascinated with Nazis, was arrested for brandishing a gun at protesters. In Northern Virginia, an SUV intentionally drove into the crowd. I have seen at least one Minneapolis activist theorize that Boelter’s killings were a false flag operation coordinated by the police, and while that certainly aligns cover-ups the police have perpetrated in the past, there is as of now no actual evidence to substantiate it. I find it irresponsible to disseminate unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, because, while theories like this exist because of well-founded distrust of police, they also exist because people don’t want certain events to have actually happened. Accepting false flag narratives apropos of nothing but vibes creates a situation in which anything that fits the speaker’s preferred narrative is real, and anything the speaker doesn’t want to acknowledge the implications of is a hoax. To me, the implications of this violence are clear. Trump supporters did not dismiss a mass demonstration of opposition to their leader. They met it with armed force, and that indicates that they felt threatened.

Of course, it would be remiss of me to mention violence in connection to the No Kings protests, or false media narratives, and not bring up the killing of Arthur Folasa Ah Loo in Salt Lake City. He is the exact sort of person that warrants a “Say His Name” chant. The story I read on my ride home, distributed by several news outlets, had been that Arturo Gamboa had been seen aiming his rifle into the crowd, and that a “peacekeeper” had fired at him in an attempt to prevent a mass shooting, accidentally striking Ah Loo in the process. But reports from the ground, as valiantly collected by Marisa Kabas and Bryan Schott of The Handbasket, tell a radically different story:

[Video] clearly shows Arturo in full black dress casually walking towards the protest with his rifle pointed down towards the ground and one hand on the barrel,” a friend of Gamboa, whose name isn’t being shared to ensure his safety, said after watching the video many times over. “The security team approach him from the side and rear, almost across the street, with weapons out.”

He continued: “You can hear in the audio that they fire on Arturo, at which point he leans forward, which causes the rifle and his hand to come up, but not in a ready position, in a fleeing position. The security team continues to fire twice more, and Arturo runs away as the video ends.”

It was this sudden repositioning in response to the volunteer shooting his gun that may have made it appear as though Gamboa was aiming his weapon at the crowd. But no video shared so far bears out that version.

The referenced footage has since been picked up by mainstream sources such as NBC. Gamboa, the son of Venezuelan immigrants, is described in the Handbasket article as a punk musician and a regular attender of left-wing protests, a man quoted describing America as “a steam train that’s always been fueled by Black and brown bodies and by the emotional, physical, and spiritual pain of poor people.” He was at the protest in support of its aims, not as a violent infiltrator, and his rifle– on display in an open-carry state, I should add– was part of that support. The safety volunteer, a military veteran who Utah 50501 stated they enlisted because of his military experience, took the presence of a militant Latino protester as a threat, retaliated without asking questions, and in the process killed an unarmed Samoan man. Now Gamboa is taking the fall for a tragedy created by 50501’s insistence that violence be the sole prerogative of the authorities.

There is much to be said about the shooting, which deserves an essay of its own and which I cannot attempt to do justice here. My primary conclusions are twofold: first, this situation is a perfect illustration of one of many reasons why so many activists are adamant to never collaborate with the police or military. When organizers cooperate with these institutions, they automatically render their spaces unsafe for Black and brown attendants. It’s no wonder, then, that in a place as diverse as the Twin Cities, the turnout for No Kings was overwhelmingly white: 50501 had already made it clear that people of color would not be prioritized and therefore were not fully welcome.

Second, 50501’s complete mishandling of the situation and refusal to take any responsibility for their role in Ah Loo’s death validates the accusations that these organizers are not for the people. When push came to horrifying shove, they protected the image of military “peacekeepers” and laid blame on a protester who kept his gun to the ground and never fired a shot. Framing Gamboa as to blame for their own volunteer’s misreading of the situation creates a narrative that militancy is suspect and pacifism is the only valid mode of resistance.

So I want to make it clear that any optimism and positivity I’ve expressed towards the No Kings rally is not because of, but in spite of, its organizers. I don’t trust these organizers as far as I can throw any of them. And their investment in framing police-sanctioned gatherings as the only acceptable channel for opposition flies in the face of my hope for this rally: that it would be many people’s first step towards more. I’m not saying that everybody needs to chain themselves to trees or light cars on fire in order to make a difference— I certainly have not lived up to that standard myself. But we need more than brunch, and 50501 seem entirely opposed to that.

What I am left with is a hope that a protest can be more than its organizers (like the LA No Kings protest, where, despite 50501’s best efforts, rocks and bottles were reportedly launched at cops.) That it is not the people at the highest levels of politics that make the earth move, but the people on the ground. That no matter how much those in power try to control us, people remain autonomous. This includes people whose ideology I abhor, but who still often find themselves stumbling into mutual aid and direct action. My hope is in the seeds sown by people like Guante, and his message that a march is a first step, not a destination.

My hope, my disappointment, my conflict, is that this march was not enough, but it was also not nothing. Whatever good feeling— hope, joy, consolation, inspiration— we created that day, it is now everybody’s task, whether they were on the ground that day or not, to ensure that those feelings are not in vain.

May the memory of Arthur Folasa Ah Loo be for a blessing.