POLITICS -- I help out at the No King's protest and then attend my Congressman's Town Hall
Busy week here.
Thanks for coming back, unless this is your first time here in which case I am going to summarize my key ideas below. This week I helped with the “No Kings” protest on Saturday. If you did not see me there, it’s probably because you missed me among the five million or more other people who participated. I also attended my local Congressman’s Town Hall.
No Thursday column planned this week, but I will be back on Sunday, Ishl Allah.
So who is Curtis Yarvin again? If you don’t know you haven’t been paying attention to me but maybe you will pay attention to Heather Cox Richardson. Everybody admires Heather Cox Richardson and with good reason. She’s brilliant, insightful, and communicates well. Her daily column is widely read and admired. And she’s a historian. For what it’s worth the Congressman’s aide at the town hall had no idea who Curtis Yarvin was either or what a “Freedom City” was even though Donald Trump has openly praised his tech oligarch allies proposal to build ten of them on US soil during his term. I begged her to learn these things and make sure Congressman Paul Tonko, generally a very smart man, learns these things too. Unless you have some sense of his ideas, Elon Musk’s mass destruction of our government seems merely random and pointless and not part of any plan.
Congressman Paul Tonko’s Town Hall
And this evening, Monday evening, I attended a “Town Hall” put on by our local Congressman Paul Tonko. I’m going to discuss that too.
Paul Tonko is a smart man, a skilled career politician. Like all good career politicians he has a helpful and skilled stuff that aid constituents with problems and I owe them several debts of gratitude. I first began to watch him in 1999 or 2000 when I was a small town newspaper reporter and he was a state, not federal, government representative. I dealt with a few of them back then and multiple town and county officials and elected representatives as well. He was definitely the smartest of the bunch and the only one I consciously remember watching, noticing distinct patterns in his responses to difficult questions that turned a tough, challenging question that showed ignorance into a chance to shine and come out looking good. I did my best to learn them and put them in my mental toolbox.1
And it is interesting that the moderator was a female reverend of a liberal Presbyterian Church, something I find interesting as I think it is a mistake to allow cold-hearted people who advocate policies that hurt the poor and desperate to co-opt the name and symbols of Christianity.
It’s also wonderful that we, the protestors, the true patriots who embrace real American ideals during this insane period called Trump 2.0, are embracing the American flag too.
And there were many good things about the Town Hall. The turn out was substantial but not overflowing, well run. The Congressman was on a stage in a large auditorium at a local community college ( a good one too where I have taken many of my EMT and EMS courses ). The audience was mostly ordinary looking citizens in the second half of their life, largely but not overwhelmingly White.
As many wanted to ask questions, the system was take a ticket if you wished to ask a question and if your number one a raffle then you could stand up, take the microphone and ask the congressman.
I did not take a ticket or ask questions, by the way.
There was a feeling of revived but hesitant optimism as the nationwide protests of three days before had energized people, especially as the appearance of five million or so American spending their Saturday protesting a sitting President on his birthday had not just eclipsed and outshined the stupid and wasteful military parade that that same shameful excuse for a President had funded with our taxes while simultaneous cutting veteran’s benefits. No wonder the marching troops often phoned it in shuffling down the street.
(And there was indeed a very strongly worded question on that from an African American woman military veteran who objected strongly to this regime’s recent cuts in mental health and other health benefits for veterans.)
An older woman got another chance at a question. She began with a statement. “I am 71 years old and for the first time in my life I protested on Saturday. My husband thought it was silly, but how else can we turn some of these Republicans around and get them to impeach this man?”
A constant refrain was that the President and his appointed allies were breaking the law and violating the constitution repeatedly and needed to be stopped.
Congressman Tonko’s replies were good, and I think sincere, but they did show dangerously conventional thinking that seemed to be based on past patterns of government, patterns based in the premise that the institutions that the current regime is actively working to destroy will still be around for the next and future elections, and that these institutions will be available to help us so long as we stay the course.
In other words, as I understood his speaking, he suggested that we document, analyze, don’t rely just on numbers to sway people but have dramatic stories about the real effects the bad policies have on real people, and use them to sway people in preparation for the next election.
I’m not sure what to make of it. At times, including this one, it seems that the reactions of mainstream Democrats to the current attempts to destroy our government are a bit like a group of surprised people who have had their cocktail party crashed by a drunken outlaw biker gang and are responding by carefully cleaning up the tossed snacks, spilled drinks, and broken dishes and furniture that are scattered all over the living room thanks to the rowdy party-crashing vandals while somehow completely oblivious to the fact that the same crowd of violent bad guys is now outside, trying to light the corners of their house on fire with them inside.
And the Democrats respond with “Oh my! Donald Trump is being naughty again. Let’s go grab the dustpan and clean up. Surely, when people see all this trouble he caused, we will vote him out in the next election. No need to leave the house or over-react, I suppose.”
WHAT IS GOING ON AND HOW I SEE THINGS
If you have been reading this column for the last few months, there are a few themes I hope you have noticed. If not, I am not doing a good job of writing.
Donald Trump, while oblivious and ignorant to much of the world around him, has a very well-honed set of skills. Do not underestimate him. People who have dismissed him as a loud idiot have often paid a steep price.
One of these skills is to tell people what they want to hear and promise to give it to them in return for their support.
Donald Trump is very good at finding obscure, unhappy, and frustrated fringe groups —including hate groups— and making them feel important and promising them support. (Robert Kennedy Jr and the wacko anti-vaxxer, anti-science people probably fall in this category too.)
Donald Trump wants to be a dictator, and is actively trying to change institutions and put things in place to do so.
While he has researchers who are helping him find ways to do this, he’s not doing it terribly smoothly because he’s not a detail oriented or sophisticated man, and the result is great inefficiency the last few months and constant legal problems and surprises. Despite massive and poorly thought out and designed government cuts from his allies, the deficit is going up, for instance.
Very few people in Trump’s government are there because they love Trump and his ideas. Most are there out of short term self-interest and have no plans to speak truth to power when he gets wacky. And the people who are there because they love Trump and his ideas live in a fantasy world based on lies so they aren’t much use when it comes time to making good decisions or enacting effective policies. 2 The almost universal thread among the Trump supporters I know personally is that they reject “the mainstream news and ordinary sources of knowledge” as somehow optional” and instead turn to garbage sources to form their beliefs about the world around them. News flash. The news is usually correct but it almost always lacks context. You get context through education but MAGA people almost always reject education too, and the result is people forming their view of current events from internet chat rooms full of equally misinformed people. As the computer people say and I used to teach my students in China, “GIGO -Garbage In, Garbage Out.” You can’t accomplish good things, using garbage data, and they don’t.
Instead what you have backing Trump is a loose knit, poorly connected group of cliques and factions all linked together out of what all of them see as temporary convenience.
I count three of these in particular.The MAGA fanatics — see above.
The Project 2025 Faction -Right Wing Christian Nationalists
The Tech Oligarch Billionaires - Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Elon Musk, etc., all united in the ideas of Curtis Yarvin. Very big problem, very underestimated.
Now here’s the Clincher!! All three of these groups
—- the MAGA Fanatics —- ,
— the Project 2025 Christian Nationalists — ,
— the Tech Oligarch Billionaires who read and admire the idea of Curtis Yarvin -
THEY ALL WANT A DICTATORSHIP BUT THEY WANT A DIFFERENT STYLE OF DICATORSHIP THAN THE OTHERS!
oh MY goodness!
Aside from a vague belief in White supremacy and the unimportance of non-White working class people, these three groups have a shared belief in almost nothing. They will not work together well for long.
And while I have said that I can’t imagine Trump is going to last as the leader of the USA for the next three and a half terms for reasons described in past columns, what’s going to happen after he is gone is that these three factions are going to vie with one another for power and please notice of the three, the MAGA fanatics are the least dangerous
Which means things are gonna get bad until they get better but we need to be prepared for them to get bad right after they get better cause it will probably be worse not better soon after it starts to seem better. Clear enough?
And my report on the local No Kings protest.
Saturday, I went to the local No Kings protest. I was one of the safety volunteers who sort of roamed a section of the protest and tried to keep an eye out for trouble or medical issues. I also passed out about 2 dozen small American flags although most had brought their own.
To do this and get this role, I attended some meetings and took an on-line “de-escalation training.” As some of you know, I have 13 years of large event security experience and several more years of ambulance work. Therefore, I had thought that it would be a mere formality, and that I was supposed to try and use non-violent techniques to respond to people threatening the crowd. However, the training was actually intended to teach us how to calm down our own people, and keep everyone who was protesting as mellow and happy as possible and if someone from the protesters tried to go argue or fight with a counter-protestor then to convince them, our people, to come back and avoid unnecessary trouble. It was an interesting hour and a half training.
As no one told me not to, I wore my EMT hat, and I did have some minimal medical supplies that I had brought (tourniquets and bleeding supplies and a CPR mask), and a raincoat and goggles and a face mask and a sweatshirt because the weather was unpredictable in my backpack. And, of course, I carried my small American flag because -you know- patriotism, and a pool noodle. That’s a brightly colored foam thing about 3 feet long that is difficult to ignore if waved in the air yet impossible to turn into a weapon. (I did study it, trying to find a way to use it as a weapon, and the best i could come up with was that one could distract someone with it while you kicked them in the knee.) People seemed impressed with the EMT hat and many asked me if I was a real EMT (yes) and i the town or an organization had sent me (“no, I’m just a volunteer with one of the organizing groups in the coalition,” I said, “but I am an EMT.”)
I had a partner, a woman much younger than me who was a social worker. She kind of chose me when it was time to pair up at the pre-protest organizing team up, a very pleasant woman, but she also introduced me to her boyfriend during the protest as he was there too so don't get ideas or anything.
No medical issues. A minor incident where someone in a truck with a big "Trump" sign on the side stopped and tried to shout at people and a couple people rushed up to try and shout back but it was easy enough to get our people to move back on the sidewalk and let the guy drive away.
Now as stated, I have 13 years experience in concert and large event security, so if anyone wonders, I did have a plan as to how to respond if the man in the truck had jumped out and began threatening or coming after me. 3
I saw several people that I knew from different places. It was fun to say hello to them. I would say 90% of the reported 5,000 or so people looked extremely ordinary and normal. Not the usual protest crowd at all. Personally, I pretty much gave up sign waving protesting in the 1980s but I guess it's time to return to it. This clown and his billionaire friends have gone too far and messages need to be sent that he cannot establish a dictatorship in our democracy. My ancestors have been working for centuries to make our homeland be the best place it can be and we will not sit back and let it be destroyed and perverted. At this point the only reason a person of good intent can support Trump is if they are misinformed or emotionally disturbed. -lots of funny signs. The one below is my favorite.
Humorous signs are an important part of the American protest style.
Now if one wonders, yes, protesting is common in the USA but a typical protest, seriously, has about a dozen people show up. Seriously. That’s about it. And these dozen people usually know each other and go to several protests a year, sometimes a few each month or one every week. It’s what “those” people do and their friends know them for being an active protesting type of person. I’m those twelve people were here with us, but so were thousands of ordinary people too and that’s what made this important. It’s a very good thing that it went this well.
Local News Coverage of the Local Protests. There were over 2,000 Peaceful Protests in the USA this Saturday
All contain some video of local events.
What I found particularly significant and encouraging is that this station reached out to local Republican organizations and got no comment. I look forward to the restoration of the Republican party, a return to normal Republican behavior, and American democratic (small “D”) norms.
The other two TV local stations have videos but made them intentionally difficult to share.
https://www.news10.com/news/thousands-in-capital-region-participate-in-nationwide-no-kings-rally/
https://wnyt.com/top-stories/capital-region-communities-joining-nationwide-no-kings-movement/
More Reading and Interesting News Stories
BBC - The '3.5% rule': How a small minority can change the world 13 May 2019 Share Save David Robson
Consider following Wired Magazine
Consider following the Legal Eagle YouTube Channel
Just Security - Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to Trump Administration Actions
As always, thanks for spending time reading my sub-stack. Please tell your friends and consider purchasing a paid subscription.
And please consider purchasing my book on Trump. We are living in a very strange period of history, and it is important to understand it.
https://www.amazon.com/Scams-Great-Beyond-Presidential-Paranormal/dp/B08JVPHMD1/
Footnotes and After Thoughts
Okay, someone’s going to ask here’s the pattern:
Q. “What is your understanding of Problem X and what do you plan to do to fix it?”
(Politician realizes he knows almost nothing about Problem X and has no idea how to fix it. But does he panic? Go all ‘deer in the headlights”? No, he uses this pattern.)
A: “Interesting question. As a member of the A, B, and C committees who has worked on Problems such as Y and Z, which have some commonalities with Problem X and which you will recalled I was successful in adressing key problems L.M.N.O. and P, then I am quite aware that Problem X is indeed a problem but I feel very qualified to look into and find solutions.”
What was my plan if a very angry MAGA supporter looking for a fight with a random “liberal snowflake protester” had approached me looking for a fight? Well, if he’d charged right in on me then I would have had to respond physically either by getting out of the way or trying to spin him around and dump him on the ground, but I figured he would probably turn it into a jump in my face and try and frighten and socially dominate me in which case my plan was to praise him and say things like “WOW!! You want to fight all these people alone in the middle of this crowd with cops around! Man, you’ve got both guts and balls. I am impressed. You got guts, man. Tell you what. You are so cool. Come back in two hours and I want to buy you a beer. Now get out of here before the cops come. But come back in two hours and I will buy you a beer, oh man! You are so cool!” - which might have worked, or it might just have confused him long enough to break the dynamic of head on confrontation. Meanwhile I would be watching his hands and body language to see if he were going to throw a punch or kick where it would come from so I could get out of the way.
Herding drunks is a bit like bullfighting but with really weird ass conversations throw in for good measure.
Shout out to Marc MacYoung who in one of his many books had in a throw away line about “people who want to be tough go into a fight pumping themselves. People who are tough, go into a fight making a plan for the fight.” -or words to that effect. It got me thinking this way years ago and now it's a part of the plan as I approach the scene.