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For a moment there, on October 18th, 2025, I became an enemy of the state, a name on some government list somewhere, a statistic. I was one of the seven million people all across the United States who participated in the No Kings Rally. I was of statistical insignificance, sure, but I was still part of it, part of a vast sea of outraged but very civil people, in what is now being called the largest peaceful protest in American history. I didn't exactly want to be there, my wife pretty much guilt-tripped me into going, but now, upon reflection, I'm glad I went, because now I’m part of history. And I imagine, in like twenty years from now, when telling this story to my grandkids, I will feel similar to how all those baby boomers feel when they talk about Woodstock.

There were a lot of older people and veterans at the No Kings protest, which surprised me. There was also a large turnout of spiky-haired people, fishnet-wearing people, and rainbow-flag-waving people, which was not so surprising. I have a shaved head, so I was worried people might think I’m a skinhead or something, but I wear a silver hoop earring and was holding a sign, MY CATS COULD DO A BETTER JOB, which had pictures of my cats taped to it, and I'm not a skinhead, so it was actually easy for me to blend into the crowd. Many people stopped to take photographs of my sign. I wondered if these photographs would end up on some old liberal’s Facebook feed. My wife held one that read THINGS ARE SO BAD EVEN THE INTROVERTS ARE HERE, which was a slogan she had read somewhere online. It was a cool, breezy day. The sky was clear, and the air was electric with excitement. People were gathered in a huge mass at the waterfront stage pavilion overlooking the great marshes just beyond the East River. A DJ played loud music from an elaborate sound system. I watched as a man holding an RIP USA sign danced to Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence” as if he were lost in some sort of trance, which seemed a little foreboding to me, like he was reveling in the oncoming destruction of America or something. Maybe this was his last dance before the silence, who knows. A woman dressed in a full-body frog costume gave a speech. “Dressed as this badass frog, I will leap over structural oppression and ribbit my grievances louder than any frog has before.” People clapped and waved signs fervently. “The current administration already has three strikes against me. First, I'm a woman. Second, I come from a family of immigrants. And third, I’m dressed as a gigantic green frog.” Everyone laughed and cheered. She talked about how the current administration is deporting people without due process and how the military is being used to oppress American citizens and how abortion should be a human right. I thought her last point called for a more nuanced discussion around human rights, where they come from, and at which point in the human maturation cycle they should be applied, but this was neither the time nor place for philosophical discussion, so I just kept my mouth shut and listened closely. She ended her speech with WE DID NOT VOTE FOR THIS and urged everyone to chant along. The voices were cacophonous. I did not participate in the chanting because it made me feel weird, like I was being manipulated in some way. This was my first ever protest. I would normally never go to one of these things. My wife pretty much guilt-tripped me into it. My two-year-old son and twelve-year-old daughter were also there. My son was darting between people's legs like a crazy person, blissfully ignorant of politics and his part in the history being made. I was a little envious of him, to tell the truth. He eventually settled at the nearby playground with all the other children. Before the actual march started, I handed my sign to my daughter and told her to be careful, then she and her mother mingled into the crowd of chanting protesters. “When I say WE WANT, you say NO KINGS.” They all marched down to city hall chanting this and other anti-Trump slogans. Some people in pickup trucks yelled at them. I stayed back at the waterfront to keep an eye on my son because there was no way in hell he was ever going to stay focused long enough to march for an entire mile. The origin of the word “march” comes from the Latin word “Martius,” which comes from the word “Mars,” meaning the Roman god of war, which makes me feel a little uncomfortable. I enjoyed the cool breeze and watched sailors on the dock tend to their fishing boats. No one was pelted with rocks, stabbed, or shot. It was all very peaceful. When the march of protesters returned, they resembled more of a parade than a protest. Afterwards, we ate at the nearby pizza joint downtown. I hadn't eaten all day, so I ate way too many slices and spent the rest of the day feeling like a gluttonous pig. There was also a mini Comic Con going on. An entire city block was sectioned off for the event. There were about eight vendor stalls lined down the street, selling Pokémon cards, video game pins, comic books, anime plushies, and 3D-printed junk. Posters portraying Trump as a king with his face crossed out were plastered all over the old brick walls. Fake cobwebs and rubbery bats and animatronic skeletons dotted every street corner. People dressed as anime characters and superheroes carried protest signs and danced in the streets. It felt like some sort of super nerdy punk rock Halloween party. One guy dressed as Michael Myers walked around real slow, flashing his fake butcher’s knife at people, which frightened my son until he figured out it was just a costume, at which point he started circling the guy, tugging at the fabric of his outfit. All in all, it was a good time, but I was left wondering, do these protests actually accomplish anything?

I confess, even before I attended the No Kings rally, I had my doubts about the effectiveness of peaceful protests against tyrannical governments. It seems to me that if the current administration is not willing to play nice, perhaps we should not be playing nice ourselves. If you believe your human rights are being stripped, would you not want to fight like hell to reclaim them? How is marching peacefully going to reclaim what is being stolen from you? Imagine telling a slave in the 1700s that all they needed to do to gain their freedom was shout real loud and wave signs around, as if they had the education or wherewithal to withstand sustained lashings to even do that. If one is not willing to fight against what they deem as systematic violence, then how serious are they really? Structural oppression is designed to diminish the effectiveness of peaceful opposition. The current administration doesn’t even seem to care about the protests. They didn’t even give a weak sarcastic “no please stop” before the protests even happened, and they knew about these protests way in advance. In fact, the administration sort of just laughed it off. Trump even posted an AI-generated video of himself wearing a crown and dropping literal shit on protesters from a jet plane. The reason the current administration doesn’t seem to care, in my view, is because, despite high turnout, these protests don’t actually pose a threat to them. Nothing is at stake. They control both the House and the Senate. They regularly play fast and loose with the foundational documents on which this country was built. They do not play by the rules, yet we are playing by their rules. They allow us to protest, and that should tell us something right there. We are not blocking roads, cutting off supply chains, refusing to work, or being truly disobedient in any way. Hell, the organizers of the No Kings protest in my area went through days of paperwork and approvals with the local city hall to ensure that, one, they were legally within their rights to protest, and two, that the protesters would be protected when the protest actually happened. If there is not something deeply ironic about getting city hall’s approval to protest at city hall then we seriously need to consider changing our definition of irony.

I also have my doubts about these protests' effectiveness at changing people's minds. When I was at the No Kings rally, I looked around and saw only people who were already bought in. There were no MAGA hats on the sidelines going, “All these great signs are really making me want to vote Democrat.” There were no people taking fence posts out of their asses. There were no enlightened centrists in flame pants going, “Maybe they’re right, maybe Republicans and Democrats aren’t the same, maybe I should vote Democrat.” There were no terminally online Facebook moms breaking down in tears at the realization that their favorite president, who they had thought was just trolling to “own the libs,” is in fact a seriously deranged egomaniac. I mean, I can’t claim to know what was going on with every person in the crowd that day, this is all feels basically, but the people I saw already knew who they were voting for long before they came to the protest.

There is a much deeper problem at play here, I think, and it has to do with the internet and its ability to siphon people into little echo chambers. Those who fancy themselves on the right side of the political spectrum are on Twitter, Truth Social, Facebook, et cetera, sharing their anti-liberal memes, consuming their Joe Rogan misinformation about trans kids and death vaccines and Democrat-funded child sex rings, while those who fancy themselves on the left side of the political spectrum are on Bluesky, Reddit, Tumblr, et cetera, sharing their anti-conservative memes, consuming their Rachel Maddow opinion pieces about how the country is doomed and it’s all because of Trump and anyone who voted for Trump is a monster or whatever. And this has produced a society in which intelligent discourse just cannot happen. Everyone thinks everyone else is evil, and you cannot reason with evil. You hear about families being torn apart by this type of shit every single day. People are in their little camps, and each camp thinks the other camp is the problem, and now everyone thinks everyone else the problem. We have lost the ability to empathize with people. The whole topic really requires its own essay. But what it boils down to is this, when there’s a protest like No Kings, not a single right-leaning person will take it seriously because they have already been conditioned into believing that the liberals within the No Kings camp are dumbass morons who are also possibly full-blown evil. They have already made up their minds. No amount of sign waving and chanting is going to change that.

It seems to me that peaceful protests are not for persuading the other side but for gathering those already persuaded, and that’s fine if your goal is to let voices be heard and foster a sense of community, like a big help group, but the jury of my mind is still out on whether these peaceful protests actually produce meaningful change. They seem to just reinforce the fact that Trump is exceptionally good at making certain types of people hate him, but what good is all that anger if all we’re going to do is dance to Depeche Mode and wave signs around?

My wife says I am very fatalistic about the current state of US politics and that my mindset lends itself to a certain self-defeating path. I can’t say she’s wrong. I have sort of distanced myself from the whole political process at this point. I mean, I still vote, but that’s about it. She says I have diagnosed the problem but have not prescribed a solution. I counter and say that the solution is for people to stop participating in bullshit echo chambers, and then she asks me how they are going to do that, and I say by rejecting labels like Democrat and Republican and instead treating each other like human beings, and she says OK well how are they going to do that, and I say by turning the fucking phone off, and she says that’s unrealistic. She says I deal in idealism instead of realism. I say that if I can convince just a few people to turn the fucking phone off, even for just an hour a day, then the world would be a slightly better place, and she seems to agree with that sentiment, so then she told me to turn my own fucking phone off and go to the protest, so I did, and despite all my doubts, I’m glad to have gone.