More Waa-Barking at the "No Kings!" Protests

                                          No Kings! Protest Overflows Grant Park in Chicago

                                              No Kings! March Fills Downtown Chicago

Yesterday, I was at the "No Kings!" protest in Chicago.  This was one of over 2,500 protests across the United States.  It was probably the single biggest mass protest in American history.  The second biggest protest was the previous "No Kings!" protests in June.

There are reports that the march after the rally in Chicago stretched out over 22 city blocks.  I can attest to that.  And while it's hard to estimate crowd sizes in such circumstances, I would say the crowd had to be close to a half million.  My point of reference for that estimate is my experience in going to Dallas Cowboys football games at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.  Counting standing-room-only tickets, that stadium can hold over 100,000 people.  I have been to games with counts close to that.  Comparing those crowds exiting the stadium with what I saw yesterday suggests to me that the crowds yesterday must have been four to five times larger.

So what were all of these people in Chicago and around the country doing?  As I have previously said about the protests in June, when I attended the one in Grand Rapids, the "No Kings!" protests are the waa-barks of America's chimpanzee politics of resistance to Trump.  Subordinate chimpanzees utter pant-grunts to signal their fear and submission before a dominant chimp.  But subordinates can also utter waa-barks to signal their defiance of a dominant chimp.  If enough subordinates scream their waa-barks, and if the dominant chimp does not have a sufficiently strong coalition of supporters, he can be overthrown.  

If you look at the C-SPAN videos of Trump's cabinet meetings, you see Trump ordering his cabinet members to pant-grunt to him.  It often takes over an hour to go around the table with every cabinet member praising Trump as the greatest, most intelligent, most lovable leader in the history of the world.  Or if you look at the video of Trump in Ohio when he endorsed Vance for U.S. Senator, you'll hear him brag about how Vance was once a fervent critic of Trump, but now, Trump says, "he's kissing my ass."  "Kissing my ass" is Trump's fancy term for pant-grunting.

At Trump's birthday on June 14th, we saw a military parade for Trump that was a display of pant-grunting.  But we also saw that the number of spectators at the parade was small, and many of them were looking at their phones to see images of the massive crowds at the "No Kings!" protests on that same day.  The waa-barks were louder than the pant-grunts.  Yesterday, the waa-barks were even louder.  Waa-barks are one of the weapons of nonviolent resistance to oppressive dominance.

Last week, MAGA politicians warned that the "No King's" protestors were "domestic terrorists" and "Marxists" who "hated America," and that their protests would contribute to the violent insurrection of "Antifa."

I saw no evidence in Chicago for any of this.  I did see a small tent for the "Revolutionary Communists of America."  But I didn't see many people stopping off at the tent.  And I didn't see any evidence that the "No Kings!" protestors were supporting communism.  The protests pledged their loyalty to the Constitution of the United States and the American tradition of individual liberty and rights, which they saw as threatened by Trump.  I can't imagine how communists could do that.  For example, the crowd repeatedly chanted: "This Is What Democracy Looks Like."

Upholding the Constitution against Trump's unconstitutional dictatorship was the overriding theme of the protests as expressed in their signs, their chants, and in the speeches.

The next most prominent them was protecting immigrants--even illegal immigrants--from ICE.  The argument was that hard-working immigrants with families who paid their taxes and contributed to American society should be recognized as Americans with the individual rights of Americans--such as the Fourth Amendment right to due process of law.

An equally prominent theme was "We Love Chicago" and "Hands off Chicago."  Some of the most deeply emotional displays was the determination to defend Chicago and its multiethnic neighborhoods against ICE raids.  A lot of the talk was about neighbors organizing to protect their neighborhoods from ICE by people identifying ICE officers and warning their neighbors by blowing whistles in the streets and helping people escape capture by the ICE masked kidnappers.

One speaker argued that this was similar to Chicago's history of protecting fugitive slaves and refusing to obey the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it a crime to help fugitive slaves running away from their slave masters.  I found this particularly interesting because it suggested that the immigration laws being enforced by ICE were unjust laws--like the Fugitive Slave Law--and therefore there was a moral obligation to disobey those laws and the ICE officers enforcing them.

There were no National Guardsmen to be seen--suggesting that the federal court order against the deployment of the National Guard in Chicago was being obey.  Nor were there any ICE officers visible.

There were a lot of Chicago Police officers, but they were mostly stationed around the edges of the crowd.  They were clearly there to intervene if necessary to keep the peace.  But they never engaged the crowd in any way, because there were no disturbances that needed to be quelled.   The remarkable peacefulness of the protestors was crucial for showing that the claim that they were "domestic terrorists" was ridiculous.

But although peaceful, they yelled their waa-barks for all the world to hear.