No country for fascists
Beat a dog enough and it will bite
I’ve been in countries where the government stops pretending to listen. Where the machinery of the state turns its full weight on the people who built it, fed it, and bled for it. I know what that looks like from the inside. I know the smell of it.
I’m watching it happen here.
But today something else is happening.
More than 3,100 demonstrations are erupting across the United States — from Alabama to Wyoming — as millions of Americans take to the streets under the banner of No Kings. Not in blue cities. Not in the usual places. Two-thirds of the people showing up today live outside major urban centers — in small towns, in red states, in places the political class wrote off years ago.
That number matters more than the total count. That’s not a protest. That’s a country waking up.
This is the third No Kings day. The first drew five million people in June. October brought seven million across 2,700 events. Today’s numbers aren’t in yet, but organizers are anticipating what could be the largest single day of domestic political protest in American history.
Think about that for a moment. Largest in history. Not the sixties. Not the Vietnam years. Not the Women’s March. Today.
And it’s still growing.
The flagship rally is in Minneapolis. That’s not an accident.
The Twin Cities are the site of an aggressive immigration crackdown that leads to the killing of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents. Two American citizens, shot dead on American soil by men in government-issued gear. Their names, along with Keith Porter’s, are why this particular Saturday exists.
The administration calls it law enforcement. The people call it what it is.
You don’t shoot civilians and walk away clean. Not in this country. Not yet.
I want to be honest about what I see and what I don’t.
I don’t know if today changes anything structurally. I’ve watched protests before — in Iraq, in Afghanistan, from the outside looking in, and from the inside looking out. Protests are not policy. They are not legislation. They don’t, by themselves, stop a determined authoritarian.
What they do is change the math.
Every person standing in a town square in rural Wyoming today, holding a sign, surrounded by neighbors they’ve known for decades — that person is crossing a line in their own mind. That’s not nothing. That’s the beginning of a thing that actually matters, which is sustained, organized, local resistance that doesn’t quit when the cameras are focused elsewhere.
This administration is very good at waiting people out. It’s banking on exhaustion. It has been since day one. Fuck that.
Burn it down. It cannot be fixed at this point. It needs to be deconstructed and reimagined. No electoral college. No two-party duopoly. No double standards, one for elites that permits everything, and another for normals that restricts most things and grinds the people into dust.
Trump’s policies, the rising cost of living, and the war with Iran. The ritual bullying, the 53 pages of rapey shit. We are not tolerating it. This country isn’t just for billionaires. Cost of living isn’t a progressive issue. Gas prices don’t care what you voted for. When a war nobody asked for starts draining wallets in places that voted 70% red, the political calculus shifts.
The bootlickers are building this coalition themselves. Every ICE raid. Every dead civilian. Every gallon of gas. Every grocery bill. The administration is assembling the opposition more efficiently than any organizer could.
That’s the thing about overreach. It does the recruiting.
I was raised by Mennonites in Bangladesh and Haiti. I’ve seen what happens when institutions fail people completely — when the gap between what a government says and what it does becomes so wide that even the most deferential citizen can’t look away anymore.
America isn’t there yet. But we are closer than we have ever been in my lifetime.
What I’m seeing today looks like a country that knows it.
3,100 protests. Millions in the streets. Alabama to Wyoming.
They look at this country and see a population too divided, too tired, too beaten down to push back.
They’re reading the room wrong.
They always do.
Pen is a veteran, writer, and the author of Dispatches from a Dying Empire. He served as a Marine combat correspondent and Army public affairs NCO with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Just returned from our local rally. It was big. One of the best signs said:
"Trump is everything we teach our children not to be."
Just saw that the turnout on "Mar a Lago Street" was really big.
Trump said: "They're all just a bunch of paid hecklers!"
No check in MY mail box.