Voices of Resistance and Insight on the Eve of NO KINGS day
No one can ignore or smooth over or play down that the Trumpists are going full authoritarian now. So we must go full resistance, and it's good to see that many elected officials are addressing this emergency forcefully and fearlessly, tens of thousands have been acting in solidarity with the immigrants targeted by ICE, and millions of people are getting ready to stand up in tomorrow's NO KINGS events.
At junctures like these, some may think that polarization is bad, but as nonviolence strategist George Laky has pointed out, polarization brings clarity on where everyone stands, and from there action can proceed in earnest. This is a crisis, and this may be where a resolution to the crisis really starts. And really the right has long been way over there in extremism, so I'm glad we're way over here in resistance. Too many people spent too much time acting as if we were polite and didn't confront or upset them the authoritarians wouldn't be authoritarians; it's good the politics of appeasement are over. They don't work.
Now our action is deadly serious, utterly important, for the fate of this nation – and because this nation is all too powerful, for the fate of the world. We must prevail, and we are well able to. I wonder what people like Homeland Security head and serial liar Kristi Noem think their future will be in a post-Trump world, because a lot of these administration thugs have gambled everything on the would-be tyrant prevailing. Noem is a quarter century younger than Trump; chances are good she'll be around in a world where he isn't, and where he and his co-conspirators are regarded by those in power, here and abroad, as traitors and criminals and monsters. Maybe the Heritage Foundation will open up a luxury thug hideout in some nation as despotic as they hope this one will become?
But back to this very moment. I've rounded up a lot of the compelling statements being made by some of our most brilliant thinkers and champions of democracy and human rights below (and if you're looking for more good sources of information, I recommend every one of them and their sites). There's important insights in their words, and together they're a reminder of how much care and thought is on our side.
Erica Chenoweth, Soha Hammam, Jeremy Pressman, and Christopher Wiley Shay of the Crowd Counting Consortium write in Waging Nonviolence:
Our ongoing research on protests in the United States reveals that within the first two weeks of the second Trump administration, protest activity surpassed that of 2017. By the end of March 2025, there had been three times as many protests as had taken place in 2017. Protest has been surging since, with large boosts coming from major, multi-location actions in April and May.
Two notable surges of protest came on the nationwide Hands Offs protests on April 5 and No Kings protests on April 19. To date, we have tallied 1,145 protests on April 5, with events occurring in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Significantly, protest activity occurred throughout the country, including in rural and GOP-leaning towns.
...In addition to the size and scale of protest activity, the month of April alone saw a notable level of geographic dispersion. All 50 states and D.C. saw protests in the month of April. This suggests that the anti-Trump mobilization is truly nationwide.
Out of 4,770 anti-Trump protests in April and May, we recorded police injuries at three events (.06 percent) and participant injuries or property damage at only two events (.04 percent). We have recorded arrests of protesters at 20 events, or .42 percent of the total. Roughly the same distribution held for protests related to immigration policies, which constituted a large share of the events.
Overall, in over 99.5 percent of protests in April and May, we recorded no injuries, arrests or property damage — an unprecedentedly tiny fraction for a movement of this size and geographic dispersion. Contrary to officials’ hyperbolic claims of a disorderly movement attempting to sow chaos, at least through April and May, protesters associated with the anti-Trump movement were extraordinarily nonviolent in their tactics.
Erica Chenoweth
Paul Krugman in his Substack:
There are two disastrously wrong ways to read the news from Los Angeles right now, and the rest of America over the next few days. The first is to believe that there is actually anything resembling an insurrection underway. The second is to believe that the Trump administration’s response to the nonexistent insurrection is simply cynical politics, an attempt to gain Donald Trump a few points in the polls. ... The militarized response to the LA demonstrations and Trump’s warning that anyone protesting his military birthday parade (which millions probably will) will be “met with heavy force” aren’t about moving the poll numbers. They’re all about rejecting the idea that Americans have a right to oppose Trump policies. In the same interview Morris says it’s
What we’re actually seeing is much worse: An attempt to end politics as we know it, to deploy force to suppress dissent. Not eventually, but right now.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/this-is-not-a-drill
Senator Alex Padilla (before he was illegally grabbed by federal goons at Kristi Noem's press conference in Los Angeles and roughed up and handcuffed, so also before Noem lied outrageously about the whole thing) as cited in The Ink:
See, Donald Trump created this chaos. He inflamed this violence, and he did it intentionally. He sent federal agents in to terrorize communities and then turned around and blamed state and local leaders for the very chaos that he unleashed. ... He's threatened to arrest the governor of California, and now he's mobilized hundreds of Marines to deploy to Los Angeles without providing any factual or valid justification to do so. This is dangerous territory. Servicewomen and men are trained to fight wars overseas, not to police communities here in the United States, but that's exactly what Donald Trump wants. He wants to create theatrics. He wants a viral clip of a protest to turn chaotic so he can justify his crackdown on immigrants and distract from his own failures. He's testing the boundaries of his power.... California is nothing but Trump's test case for the rest of the country. We can't let him get away with it. We won't let him get away with it. So we need to push back and demand accountability before it's too late.
The Ink
Ruth Ben-Ghiat in her newsletter Lucid:
Every day, the Donald Trump administration is stress testing our democracy, taking actions to accelerate the transformation of the United States into an autocracy. Mr. Trump and his collaborators seek to undermine rule of law by targeting authorities who stand for democratic understandings of politics, government, and institutions.... Now, Senator Alex Padilla, also a member of the opposition party, was thrown to the ground, removed from a government press conference, and arrested.
...Ominously, Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem used the language of coups and foreign occupations in describing the government’s ultimate goal for its “operations” in Los Angeles. "We are not going away," Noem said. "We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialist and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country," she said, referring to Newsom and Bass.
All of these choices tell us how important the ICE operations are to the identity of this nascent regime. The government is willing to do anything –arrest judges and a Senator, and even bring in an entire infantry Marines battalion –to remove any obstructions to mass deportations from state and local officials, the law, and the population protesting in the streets.
This shows us how dependent this administration is on its fiction of an immigrant invasion. It needs this manufactured crisis to frame its power grabs as saving the nation and to pursue mass deportation as part of its racist population engineering schemes.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo
This reminds us what we know: Donald Trump wants to rule as an autocrat, a dictator. He’s reaching for that power through the unique apparatus of the American state. He greets words and civic negotiation with force, sometimes figuratively by ignoring norms and laws, sometimes literally as we saw today in Los Angeles. Noem said as much in her press conference, stating, “We are staying here to liberate the city from … the burdensome leadership [of] this governor and this mayor.” So they’re using the U.S. military to “liberate” the city from its own elected leaders; they’re there to liberate the city and state from its own popular sovereignty.
I don’t think the American people want to be ruled by a dictator. I think we’re already seeing clear signs of that. As I’ve said countless times, this is fundamentally a battle over public opinion. I do not think Donald Trump will be able to build an American autocracy if the majority of the country opposes it. The key is not defeating him in direct engagement, where he holds most of the power, but discrediting his project in the eyes of the public. A critical element of that is that elected officials cannot back down. They must continue to act like Americans. If the President wants to rule by tackling senators or arresting governors, make him do it. Elected officials owe us that. We should accept it individually ourselves as well, if need be.
I think the President’s degenerate pretensions will crumble under the weight of their own degeneracy when exposed for all to see.
Anand Giridharadas at The Ink:
The city of Los Angeles, Kwon [Andrés Dae Keun Kwon, a lawyer and organizer at the ACLU of Southern California] told us, just faced the most devastating wildfires in recent history, and now faces a manufactured firestorm. And that’s because, Anat told us, Los Angeles is what Donald Trump and Stephen Miller fear most. It’s a famously immigrant city, where people from all backgrounds can feel at home and come together to build something new. But that’s also the American story. 1 in 8 Americans lives in California. 1 in 35 Americans lives in Los Angeles. It’s as real as America gets, and it’s ridiculous to suggest otherwise. What’s happening now, she said, isn’t just a struggle in the streets, but the epic narrative battle to define what America is.
The Ink
Simon Rosenberg, The Hopium Chronicles
The escalation we are seeing in Los Angeles and across the country is a desperate and failing attempt for Trump to create a new and better narrative for a regime being thwarted on all fronts. His economic plan is failing; the markets and the public have rejected his budget bill, and it is struggling in the Senate; his tariffs have been found to be illegal by two courts, and no one is cutting deals with him or bending the knee; the courts keep ruling against him again and again, and even forced him to bring Abrego Garcia home; DOGE produced far more chaos and lawbreaking than savings; our allies are angry and we are now more alone in the world than we’ve been in generations; he got the middle finger on his land grabs; our crowds this weekend at our No Kings events will be much larger than his at his ridiculous birthday parade; Bibi appears to be defying him; Putin, Ukraine and Europe are defying him; his poll numbers have come way down and late-breaking voters critical to his election win have started wandering from him.
Trump is weak, not strong. He is losing, not winning. He is a big blubbery baby man, anything but a strong man. The circle of defiance continues to grow.
Simon Rosenberg
Leah Greenberg, Indivisible co-founder and co-executive director:
For the would-be dictator, success depends on projecting power and creating an aura of inevitability. They need you to believe that Trump is the new normal, that the MAGA movement will be in power for the long haul, that the only rational move is to go along, keep your head down, and protect your own interests.
We’ve seen over the last six months what happens when this aura of inevitability goes unchallenged. Institutions -- from state governments to businesses to civil society to higher education to media -- start to fall in line, do what Trump tells them, and/or go silent.
Here’s the thing: The aura of inevitability is a lie. It’s all a lie. Power in American society doesn’t derive from the top down. Trump’s grasp is brittle, and he’s overreaching dramatically. He will only succeed if everyone agrees to believe the lie.
https://indivisibleteam.medium.com/the-strategic-logic-of-the-no-kings-protests-e92e9dd27465
p.s. New subscribers and old, I have since launching Meditations in an Emergency on February 2 usually put out one to two newsletters/essays per week. I missed a couple because I was on a pretty grueling book tour in Europe; now I'm doing one the day after the last one just because SO MUCH IS HAPPENING.
