Why We March

I attended the No Kings rally on October 18 in my hometown of Crossville. It was an amazing experience: hundreds of local citizens protesting the actions of the current Republican Administration, as well as Tennessee’s two Republican senators and all eight Republican Members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Since October 18 I have followed the misinformation being presented by MAGA supporters who are claiming that the GOP is not trying to create a monarchy in the U.S., and that the No Kings rallies were somehow “hate America” events. These false claims came (naturally) from the right-wing echo chamber, ranging from random yahoos on Facebook all the way up to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who actually referred to “the Hamas wing” of the Democratic Party.

But the 7 million patriotic Americans who marched on October 18 put the lie to these right-wing criticisms. As historian Timothy Snyder said in a speech on No Kings Day . . .

 . . . We mean that a king is somebody who:

• wants personal rule

• wants his sons or his friends or his clan to be in power forever

• wants tyranny and not democracy

• wants oligarchy and not opportunity

• is going to gather all the wealth in the country to himself, to his family, to his clan, to a few companies and make sure that the rest of us and our kids and our grandkids don’t have opportunities

• is going to want violence and not law and who’s going to try to rule by way of violence and fear rather that confidence and security and predictability and law

• with those around him are going to lie all the time about us, about everything, about the past, and about the future, and those lies halt progress

• is going to want submission, submission from everybody, submission rather than dignity

These are the reasons we marched on October 18, and why we will always proclaim No Kings.