I’m back! We went to Madison, Wisconsin for our granddaughter’s 7th birthday, and also for brats (vegetarian style) and cheese curds and the fall colors and Kwik-Trip and all that Wisconsin stuff, but also, unfortunately, for a 7 hour drive each way, which was not fun. It was worth it, though, we wish we could see our kids more often, but most likely we won’t be seeing any of our children for another year, since winter is about to clamp down and trap us at home for a while.
Next weekend, we have closer plans. The No Kings rally is taking place right here in Morris on Saturday. You know, that communist antifa plot? The administration has it’s own characterization of the event.
n criticizing the rallies, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said,
No Kings means no paychecks. No paychecks and no government.
I guess we’ll be poor if we don’t have any kings.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy stated separately that the expected millions of attendees will be
part of antifa, paid protesters. It begs the question (of) who’s funding it.
Except that we’ll be paid for protesting! Or will we? I didn’t get a check for the last one.
I don’t think it’s at all a question who’s funding it. Even far-right wackos have noticed some data.
The name, on its face, is unobjectionable, even vaguely noble: “No Kings.” Americans, after all, did declare independence from one. But the historical overtones here mask something more recent and considerably less authentic. For all its revolutionary rhetoric, the ‘No Kings’ protest movement is not a spontaneous uprising of civic-minded dissidents. It is a coordinated, well-funded, tightly stage-managed campaign, backed by nearly 200 far-left NGOs, labor unions, and donor networks, many of which are directly tied to the Democratic Party’s power infrastructure. It operates not from the street, but from the spreadsheet.
200 far-left NGOs, labor unions, and donor networks
? Why, that sounds like a distributed grass roots network with many donors. The organization actually lists all their donors, and doesn’t pay protesters.
I didn’t use a spreadsheet to figure out that I have to oppose this president and his incompetent cronies. I’m doing it for my kids.
I’ll attend our local No Kings protest on Saturday. 4,000 attended the last one in June, which was considerably more than the George Floyd rally in 2020. I was toying with the idea of getting an Antifa t-shirt just for the hell of it. But, after careful consideration, I decided not to play into the MAGA fever dream about a vast, leftist conspiracy to undermine Trump, though that is where my heart is.
nationem Americam ab initio reges habuere.
It’s always telling that these guys can’t imagine protesters not being paid. Clearly, they would ever do anything except for the money.
Kind of make you want to audit the books of the next, well, not big, but Trump rally, just to see how many “supporters” turn out to be paid to be there. Since, as we all know, everything they accuse others of is almost always an admission of guilt.
And “crooks”…don’t forget the crooks. Incompetent crooks are the worst.
cartomancer @ #2 — That may be the case. Perhaps it’s true everywhere. All the more reason we should have “No Kings” protests, and frequently. We’ll never come close to getting rid of them otherwise.
They have a point about the “No Kings” label. How about calling it the “No Fuhrers Rally?”
Projection.
That’s the real reason that you hear all this nonsense about big-money backers and insidious networks paid for by a few wealthy Democrats funding No Kings and other left-leaning efforts. It’s because that’s the way the Republicans have actually operated at least since the Koch brothers astroturfed the Tea Party into existence. Like most underhanded things they do, they just can’t imagine that their opponents wouldn’t do the same, regardless of how unethical, anti-democratic, or shady any such effort must be.
The far left despises No Kings as canned opposition.
Although I saw that Refuse Fascism, a pretty far left organization, just sent me an email supporting No Kings.
Naw.
I/we despise Trump, the GOP, and the fundie xians for free.
I’m one of the opposition donors.
So far two checks to a legal defense fund and a political candidate in Illinois, Kat Abughazaleh. Also $30 of cat food to an associated food drive.
Nothing like the hundreds of millions, Musk spent on the GOP.
“Elon Musk spends $277 million to back Trump and …”
Then again, he can afford to spend a quarter of a billion dollars and I can’t.
One of my minor complaints about the Trump/GOP regime is that they are costing me a lot more money.
Food at the grocery store is noticeably way up in price, especially fresh fruits and vegetables. It’s obvious those persecuted farm workers were an important part of our economy.
Plus donations to the political opposition and my other causes such as the animal shelter and Wikipedia.
This will be my 7th demonstration so far this year against the GOP fascists.
It is worth going to these.
Governments fear demonstrations and people in the street for good reasons. It means they are losing control. It also means if the demonstrations are big enough and go on long enough, they are going to lose their jobs.
You can tell by the GOP reaction to the No Kings events that they know this and they are getting nervous.
I’ve seen more than a few comments on the internet that these demonstrations are useless wastes of time. That is just wrong and what the GOP wants you to think. They want you to be depressed and apathetic.
It’s how the Soviet Union fell, the Vietnam war ended, and the civil rights movement succeeded, among many others.
Xpost from a few days ago.
Actual studies by real scholars show that nonviolence is twice as effective as violence at regime change.
No nonviolent campaign that had more than 3.5% of the population participating has ever failed.
There are a lot of reasons for this but one fact stands out.
.1. More people will be in nonviolent protests than in violent uprisings.
Most people just aren’t all that interested in violence in the first place. And, a huge number of people aren’t even able to be effective guerrilla soldiers. There are a lot of not physically fit and/or people with medical problems in the USA. Some of my Boomer friends have a difficult time making it to the grocery store and back. One guy has a Medicaid helper for that.
If you have small children or pets at home, that effects your risk tolerance. You can’t afford to get killed or sent to a concentration camp.
.2. That 3.5% rule is a maximum. At that point, you are going to win.
But you don’t need 3.5% of the population in the streets to win.
Kagehi @ #4
Off the top of my head, I remember two occasions when Trump did exactly that. One was a campaign stop with supposed auto workers and another when Vance visited Greenland.
The 3.5 ‘rule’: upping the estimated population of the US to 350,000,000 in order to have a nice margin, dividing by 100, multiplying by 3.5, we get 12,250,000 people. So, what we need are repeated examples of 12 to 13 million people politely showing up in the streets….
Good luck with No Kings Day.
Speaking of arthropods leaking orange goo…
“We no longer go to the entomologist’s house for Halloween”
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/treat-2
If you gradually can increase the turnout for the future protests it seems realistic to reach 3.5% before midterms.
BTW I see a lot of Dem senators threw LGBTQ issues under the bus in a recent vote… while that was not as important as the budget, it is still an indication that those Dem senstors have not changed
. They are just opposing the budget because they are facing an existential threat, and would be primaried if they backed down.
So, on top of everything else, Dem voters need to do to their congresscritters what Republican voters always do to their politicians: make them scared of getting primaried. Otherwise they will immediately slid back into the usual center-right sludge even after Trump and MAGA are gone.
.
Their indifference over the last 40 years paved the way for Dubya and Trump. Remind them of what happened to wossname Cuomo.
That isn’t impossible.
The estimates for the last No Kings demonstration were 5-7 million people.
Don’t forget that the 3.5% rule is a maximum.
Most social and regime changes never reached that level and worked anyway.
I doubt that the Civil Rights movement or the anti-Vietnam war protests ever reached that level.
And, I doubt if millions of people in the streets is going to be enough anyway. It should be in combination with the next elections at the least.
Where’s the organization & protest against people who misuse the phrase “beg the question?” I want in!
Aren’t all payments in NoKingCoin?
@18 I beseech and implore the question.
No only am I going to the No Kings protest, I mentioned going as a group to my bimonthly D&D group and we decided to carpool.
The R congresscritters are above else yellow.
When they see the writing on the wall (together with growing evidence of Trump’s physical and mental decline) they will make an U-turn while trying to blame the mess on Biden and Obama.
Some are delusional enough to dismiss all polls, but not a majority. They got where they are by being opportunists.
I went on a date with about 1% of the far left voters in my neighbourhood — she was cute but we didn’t really click.
raven @12: ‘No nonviolent campaign that had more than 3.5% of the population participating has ever failed.’
This a false claim.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3.5%25_rule#Appraisals
Or, you could pay attention to the actual author: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr/publications/questions-answers-and-some-cautionary-updates-regarding-35-rule
“New research suggests that one nonviolent movement, Bahrain in 2011-2014, appears to have decisively failed despite achieving over 6% popular participation at its peak. This suggests that there has been at least one exception to the 3.5% rule, and that the rule is a tendency, rather than a law.”
[I took a look, there’s at least one other, the Hong Kong Protests (2019–2020) which involved more than a quarter of the population — alas, the website of the Civil Human Rights Front (CHRF) — chrf.hk — is no longer active, because the group officially disbanded in August 2021 and its web presence removed.
However, the internet remembers: https://archive.org/details/Hong-Kong-Protests-2019-06-17-67beedd700f74e908e88163566af44dd9b44441f ]
FWIW, a Vox article: https://www.vox.com/politics/464459/trump-american-democracy-u-turns
‘The president of the United States is deploying masked troops to the streets of blue cities, working to put friendly billionaires in charge of the media environment, and attempting to jail his personal enemies.
Can any democracy come back from this?
Earlier this year, two teams of researchers published papers trying to answer this exact question — and came to seemingly opposite conclusions.
Both papers focused on what they call “democratic U-turns:” where a country starts out as a democracy, moves toward authoritarianism, and then quickly recovers. The first team’s conclusions were optimistic: they identified 102 U-turn cases since 1900 and found that, in 90 percent of them, the result was “restored or even improved levels of democracy.” The second team focused on 21 recent cases and inverted the findings — concluding that “nearly 90 percent” of alleged U-turns were short-lived mirages.
So who’s right? To find out, I reexamined the basic data and spoke to researchers from each of the two teams. It turns out that the seemingly opposed findings are actually more consistent than they seem — with implications for the United States that are at once hopeful and disturbing.’
If your vote is worth nothing, why are they trying to suppress it?
If demonstrations don’t matter, why are they using force to support their systematic (and sometimes quite personal) violence and murders?
I was at a meeting in my small city about changing a street to make it safer. It turns out that the forces of carbon and death for ‘my personal convenience’ (in this case the desire to drive super fast and to park along a street in a city that isn’t theirs) didn’t like that and showed up in force. Someone there accused us residents all who were there for an informational meeting about it of being paid to be there. I asked them how worthless is your time and your life that you are here for free? I mean they clearly think that Mother Earth being systematically raped wasn’t worth anything, and that they have a right to kill pedestrians, bicyclists, and other motorists because of course they do.
They didn’t like this.
:)
Oh yeah, I looked up Kwikstar, because I hadn’t heard of it. They are nowhere near California. They sell banana boxer shorts, and banana-shaped banana cutters. Make what of that you will.
…criticizing the rallies, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, “No Kings means no paychecks. No paychecks and no government.”
So Americans never got any paychecks, or government services, before Trump came along?
It’s easy to figure out their panic when you remember that EAIAC is an iron-clad rule of Republican rhetoric
@John Morales, I wouldn’t use the Hong Kong protests as evidence as a point against the 3.5% proscription considering that it is referring to 3.5% of the population of a government, and that 2 million people that marched in HK only accounts for less than 0.2% of the Chinese population. If 25% of the Chinese population had risen up against their government, peacefully or otherwise, pretty sure changes would have happened or there would be a new regime in China :P
Portland’s Trump-Protesting Emergency World Naked Bike Ride Had More Than 1,000 Participants, But Sadly Not Everyone Was Actually Naked
killyosaur, “The 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests (also known by other names) were a series of demonstrations against the Hong Kong government’s introduction of a bill to amend the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance in regard to extradition. It was the largest series of demonstrations in the history of Hong Kong.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_Hong_Kong_protests
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_Hong_Kong
Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932021_Belarusian_protests
~500,000 protesters, population 9.1M, so around 5%
Being Dutch, I’d better not comment — King’s Day is one the biggest holidays of the year.