The Opposite of Hate

Why showing up matters

New York City, representing [Photo credit: RJC:]

I had to travel home from a conference on Saturday, so I was on a plane during the No Kings march and didn’t make it back to the city in time to join. Luckily, I had cub reporters in both New York and L.A. reporting in.

There were many clever, funny, and pointed signs, but I think the one with the most important message—and the one that resonated with me the most—was this one:

[Photo credit: BW]

Donald, the fascist Republican Party, and the corporate media have done yeoman’s work disappearing the dark acts of the insurrection. They’ve also gone a long way to absolve those responsible. But that act of betrayal is, in large part, what led to yesterday because, while there are more Americans who are easily misled fools than I’d care to admit, most of us aren’t. Yesterday’s turnout, and the way the vast majority of participants conducted themselves, confirmed my faith that there are indeed more of us than there are of them. It should inspire all of us that so many people across generations, belief systems, and races; that members of almost every kind of community came out in force, peacefully and with joy to say with one voice:

“We love our country; we reject tyranny; America has never been and will never be a monarchy.”

(Also, “Fuck you, Donald,” which, while implied, was not the overriding message.)

The very idea of these protests terrified the Trump regime. So desperate were they to deflect attention away they mischaracterized them as “Hate America Rallies.” They literally equated the anticipated millions of Americans exercising their first amendment rights to terrorists.

Times Square [Photo credit: RJC]

I’m quite tired of the other side’s continuing to throw out descriptors they can’t even define—anybody who disagrees with them is a Marxist-communist-socialist no matter how nonsensical that is. But after decades of training, the Republican base reacts with Pavlovian fervor to whichever scare words are currently deemed most effective. Calling us socialists used to be enough, but as Donald and his corrupt, inept regime is straining under the weight of all those chickens coming home to roost, the language—and the implications attached to it—are becoming more extreme.

Calling us pro-Hamas and Antifa and, as Karoline Leavitt put it, “terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals” is akin to the strategy of using dehumanizing language to describe immigrants and undocumented workers: they are “swarms” coming across the border; they are murderous vermin so far outside the human that they lie in wait in their suburban kitchens to stab white people and steal our pets in order to eat them.

Already conditioned to eye us with suspicion—we coastal elites contemptuous of “real Americans” like them and the hard work they do—the base is now being told to believe we’re terrorists who hate America—we are, that is, beyond the zone of protection. We aren’t just different and weird with misplaced priorities, we are a threat to them, their children, and their country, unbound by any allegiance to basic human decency.

NYC—puppies know! [Photo credit: RJC]

This remains one of the most stubborn conundrums of this time—everything they say about us, in terms of the threat they accuse of posing, is true about them.

According to NPR, “Police in New York City and Washington, D.C., where rallies drew some of the day’s biggest crowds, said no protest-related arrests were made.”

The protests—over 2,600 across the country and many more across the globe—were almost entirely peaceful. Nobody who showed up was there to cause trouble—they were there to exercise their first amendment right to protest a government that is illegitimate, corrupt, and hell-bent on installing an authoritarian who fancies himself a monarch with the purpose of dismantling the constitutional order to maintain minority power while enriching themselves.

Towards that end, Donald and the rest of the people currently in charge of this country are trying to convince their base that people like me and you hate America. But I love my country, just as everybody who protested yesterday loves this country—we simply hate everything the Trump regime is doing to it.

[If you attended a March, please send your pictures to info@marytrumpmedia.com.]