I was unable to go to Saturday’s No Kings rally in Oakland, although I did go to the previous ones. Reportedly this last one was the biggest ever, not just in Oakland but in a thousand other cities across America. I celebrate and honor this great and historic event.
There’s much discussion of the specific reasons people protested. For some it’s the new war in Iran, although when the previous rallies occurred there was no war. Some came out for Palestine, others for women’s rights or LGBTQ rights, or to protest the regime’s inaction on climate change, or against authoritarianism, or against ICE, or about Epstein, or just about any other issue in America. I, myself, care about all those things, although if I had to choose one thing that most upsets me, it’s the threat of rightwing, White nationalist “Christians” who want to turn America into a theocracy, or what I call a religious maniacracy. But regardless of anyone’s particular issue, it all comes down to Trump, who encompasses everything wrong in our country. MAGA subsumes every threat, every dagger aimed at the heart of our country, so until MAGA is eradicated, that threat will remain.
From the reporting I’ve seen, the backbone of these No Kings protests is older people. I’m proud of my cohort for turning out and standing up for the America we’ve known all our lives. Far be it from me to say that old people are the only repository of wisdom. When I was a young radical running around in the 1960s and 1970s I thought old people were unnecessarily conservative and I resented them. Now, I realize that old people have experienced a lot, read a lot, and spent a lifetime thinking about what makes a country great—and they realize that this rightwing MAGA cult is a cancer on the body politic. They have children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren whom they wish to live free. They do not want Trump, his corrupt family and his corrupt crew—Bondi, Hegseth, Vance, and just about every rightwing preacher and Fox “News” mouthpiece--to have the power to ruin America. I know that there are a lot of young people, especially White males, who buy into MAGA. But that is because they’re mentally ill, and were raised in households that didn’t teach them basic moral values. Hopefully, their grandparents, Aunts and Uncles and other older role models can turn them around before it’s too late.
In politics, you never get 100% purity from your electeds. They may vote your way 98% of the time, but sometimes they’ll disappoint you, just the way Trump is disappointing some MAGAs who don’t like his war on Iran. That’s just the way things are. Even I agree with some things Trump has done—his support for the police, for instance. But his sins, his crimes, his various pathologies make him unsuitable to be President of a great and powerful country. I know that some of my readers will support Trump all the way, even though they admit that he’s a failure as a good man, a decent man, a respectable man. I think that’s madness, but it’s their right. We’ll just have to fight this out in the streets—peacefully—with more No Kings Protests, until the threat from MAGA is gone and we don’t have to take it to the streets anymore. My one regret with these great turnouts, here in Oakland, is that Barbara Lee and her radical supporters claim that this is a great victory for wokeism. It is decidedly not. The people are against authoritarianism, but they are not in favor of a government consumed by racial resentments that seems interested in little other than destroying a once-great American city.
Steve Heimoff