What’s Going to Happen on “No Kings Day”?
It could go a bunch of different ways.
It could be signs and quiet crowds like the big Tea Party rallies
It could be dominated by the womyns. On Instagram and X they seem the maddest.
It could be clashes between protesters and law enforcement officers. Scuffles but non-lethal.
It could be full-boat Antifa with violent intent.
It could be hellfire, like the George Floyd riots.
It could be Robert de Niro and a few of his very cross elderly friends and admirers.
I don’t know what’s going to happen. All I can do is share with you the factors I regard as the most telling. How they all shake out or come together is a mystery that can only be answered in the unfolding of events. But here’s what I think...
The mass media want a giant national day of angry protest against the Trump administration. They keep telling us direly how many locations are planning for large-scale protest events. 14 locations in tiny Connecticut! Wow. Somebody on Instagram published a long list of European countries planning protests in sympathy with distraught Americans, including several nations with sitting royal families, like, you know, King Charles.
At the same time, the same mass media are trying to convince us that there is no Antifa, no organized, professional of military-trained protest troops already in place to provoke riots. the uprising they want, and envision, will be a spontaneous coming together of the all the deeply committed backers of Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, the governors of New York and Illinois, and the student bodies of college and universities who have faithfully supported Palestine, vilified Jews, and identified Trump as the carbon copy of Hitler (who saved the Jews a few days ago by accident?), and all the pissed of women in what used to be Christendom but is now a pagan army carrying banners sanctifying abortion and the castration of confused children.
That’s called having your cake and eating it too. There is no amassing of dangerously angry civilians without organization, money, serious logistical preparation (transport, water, food, etc), and territorial objectives of some kind. If the media are right, that there is no Antifa or anything like it on that scale, then No Kings Day is going to be a bunch of eclectic demonstrations with hand-scrawled posters, uncharismatic local politicians and activists for speakers, indifferent police presence, and nothing in particular to rage at. The Democrat Party is so destitute of leadership there is no real unifying message except hatred for Trump, which can be expressed in a single full-throated chant by the thousands, hundreds, dozen, handfuls of protesters gathered together in odd locations on a day off from work.
If they’re wrong about the existence of well-funded protest organizations of whatever name, there is still a problem. There just can’t be enough of these mercenaries to be effective in more than a few very predictable urban locations. These are most likely going to be in cities where there will be inevitable confrontations with federal law enforcement officers. Whatever happens will be ugly and not something you’d want your mother to see, unless she’s one of the Code Pink crowd with a pussy hat and a poison hatpin. This means that whatever happens “across the breadth and depth of the nation” will not look very uniform of purpose, just a series of tantrums by children at different grade levels in school.
What else? How many are really going to attend a No Kings event more to see what’s going on than to lead the charge against the forces of Trumpian fascism? That depends on what else they have to do on a Saturday. College football, shopping, smoking weed with friends and catching the protest action on TV, missing it altogether because they never heard about it in the first place. It’s not like everyone is still watching the same network shit on TV anymore. There are more channels than there are hairs on Taylor Swift’s head. And that’s before you even factor in video games and Internet betting apps.
My guess is that Democrats, meaning the people who voted for Joe and then Kamala, are not real fired up about politics right now, except for the part about hating everybody on the scene almost as much as they think they hate Trump. Who is still the only thing on the news that ever catches your eye for a few seconds. Always up to something.
The organized stuff will happen but you don’t have to be Kreskin to figure out what’s going on when the protest placards are neatly mounted and, well, manufactured.
We don’t any of us have to be Kreskin. He was just an illusionist who played a psychic on TV. Kind of like all the news outlets here at home and abroad. Nobody knows what’s going to happen on Saturday.
Except for the obvious part. There will be lots of camera trucks and reporters in makeup looking for Trump haters to talk to on the streets and sidewalks. My only hard prediction is that some gang of halfwits in California will try to block a highway. Apart from that, I won’t be paying attention. The football is likely to be more interesting, especially this year when even the professional oddsmakers don’t know for sure who’s filling the pockets of the referees to decide those big money games.
Good luck with all that. I’ve got cats to look after…
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