I nearly missed the May Day (or “Mayday,” as I tend to call it, because the nation is in fucking danger) protest because I wrongly thought it was still April. It was only when I noticed news coverage of the event that I realized I had to get out to DC, so I practically ran out the door with toast in my mouth—weekdays are always hard for civic action.
I came huffing and swearing into Lafayette Park when they were setting up a stage and, for some reason, playing “Fight Song,” which never fails to trigger the painful knot of emotion from election night 2016.
I later learned that before I had arrived, a bigger group had been on a merry march around the city, with some doing an acapella of Woodie Guthrie’s “All You Fascists Are Bound to Lose.”
That illustrates a dividing line between two faces of the #resistance here—there are the immigration, labor-focused activists who are fighting for their lives, and there are people recycling 2016 memes. I often tend to fall into the latter, though in my heart I fancy myself the former. I do believe that there is still some potency in the insult comic style that we should not neglect.
Still, I find myself averse to that camp when I see it in person. One demonstrator was dressed, for example, like one of the Handmaid’s Tales, but was also wearing a V for Vendetta mask and carrying a sign saying something like “even the introverts left their house for this!” and I am still convinced he must have been a government plant.
There were plenty of signs outside the White House, but the crowd was not too dense—a school field trip crashed right through a group chanting: “Impeach, convict, remove,” though that noise was muffled by what seemed to be a disco DJ. Not sure why they were playing “Don’t Stop Believing”—to be honest, I worry we will have to stop believing soon.
Another group had set up a grand “We the People” scroll on the ground for everyone to sign. It took me several pens, but I made sure to include a link to the Partisan Hex webstore, home of the “Trump Is a Bitch” t-shirt, as my signature.
I was bored and ready to leave. I am not unamused by entertainment-protesting—in fact, I have said that it is a better use of one’s time than watching Netflix—but on a hot Thursday afternoon? It is not worth the strain to come out for the memes.
I heard new, louder voices in the distance: “Immigrant busting is disgusting!” A far more massive and vital bloc in red shirts arrived from CASA, the immigrant worker rights group. Behind them came a wave of blue-shirted activists from the National Education Association, the largest labor union in the United States, representing public school teachers, support staff, faculty, and other education professionals. Their arrival spared me from having to listen to some older guys trying to start a chant of jokes about President Donald Trump’s small, mushroom-shaped penis. Altogether, organizers said more than 5,000 attendees turned out.
Bishop Duane Royster, the opening preacher, asked if we wanted to “take America back.” Usually that language means something sinister, but now it is right. America has been abducted, has it not? Body and spirit. It feels sometimes that the whole country is headed to the gulag.
He said more hopefully: “The thing they forgot is: working folks ain’t scared. We are not afraid of the terror that comes by night. We will fight—because when we fight, when we fight, when we fight, we shall win.”
To be clear, I think “the terror that comes by night” sounds like something anybody, working, unemployed, rich or poor, ought to be worried about. I am begging for a moratorium on “When we fight, we win.” We did fight. We are fighting. And while we have won sometimes, we have also lost too, and there is great resultant suffering. There is danger in suggesting that if we lose, it is because we were insufficiently hardworking. Sometimes we fight and should win, but still lose because someone cheats or an institution fails.
Mr. Royster called for “an exorcism in the White House,” but his actual demands, not “us[ing] poor people to hurt poor people… cut[ting] Medicaid and SNAP and education and then us[ing] that money to deport and detain our immigrant siblings,” which he called a “sin that comes directly from the pit of Hell,” should not be seen as fiery at all. “We are calling on Congress, as we gather here, not to cut programs that help working families across this country. Do not cut SNAP. Do not cut Medicaid. Do not cut education. Do not slash the very things that help build our nation. Instead, we call on them to turn around and make bigger investments—so we have more health care, better education, and more resources for our communities.”
He said: “We’re going to win by sticking together. We’re going to win by fighting together. We’re going to win by walking together, marching together, holding arms together, lifting each other up together.”
I hope we can. I hope we do.
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, cried on stage, saying: “Estoy aquí sin importar los intentos de esta administración de romper mi espíritu,” which translates to: “I am here despite the administration’s attempt to break my spirit,” and described her husband’s abduction by ICE. She said: “he was illegally detained. Abducted. Disappeared. They threw him away to die in one of the most dangerous prisons in El Salvador—with no due process. Because of an ‘error.’ It’s been fifty days. Fifty days of pain and suffering. Fifty days of uncertainty. And when we finally saw the proof that Kilmar was alive—my children and I had to watch as Trump and Bukele’s administrations laughed over our pain…. This pain is indescribable.”
I felt something heavy in my chest as I processed witnessing this grief. She called to her husband: “If you can hear me: I love you. Keep your faith in God. Know that the children and I are still fighting to bring you home.”
Hearing that makes the relative powerlessness of any individual excruciating. I cannot bring her husband home. None of us can. All we can do is try to move the country’s different institutions to doing something just.
Ms. Vasquez was escorted away by volunteers because, unfortunately, we are not in an America where we can trust she will not be harassed, or worse. Her family had already moved into a safe house after Mr. Trump’s DHS uploaded to Twitter a copy of a temporary civil protective order against Mr. Garcia from 2021, effectively “post[ing] [her] address, the house where [her] family lives, for everyone to see.” She, rightfully, does not “feel safe,” “especially when this case has gone viral and people have all sorts of opinions,”
Representative Pramila Jayapal thanked Ms. Vasquez and announced that she was going to “hold a shadow hearing next week”—an unofficial congressional-style forum organized by the minority to solicit testimony that would otherwise be suppressed by Republicans—“to make sure that we bring Kilmar Abrego García back to the United States.”
Ms. Jayapal said: “We are here because we say: not on our watch. Not on our watch to Trump’s kidnapping and deporting of immigrants. Not on our watch to going after immigrant workers who are union organizers—like what happened in my home state of Washington. Not on our watch to deporting U.S. citizen children in the middle of cancer treatments. Not on our watch to rounding up legal permanent residents and visa holders simply because they disagree with what this administration says. We say: not on our watch to killing industries powered by immigrants. Not on our watch to terrorizing thousands of foreign students by revoking their visas. Not on our watch to a wholesale war that Trump is waging on immigrants of every legal status, and on workers, and on the right to collectively bargain.”
I hate to undermine such a powerful admonishment, but unfortunately, the things she listed were all things that have happened, so it is incorrect to say “not on my watch” when we mean to say: “we are watching these horrors occur and condemning them.” We urgently must deter this destruction, but we should not rhetorically congratulate ourselves until it has been stopped—this must be more accurately framed as a “Never Again” moment in order for us to be exact in our moral reckoning.
She pivoted to: “They want to attack immigrants and tank the economy, destroy the programs that meet our basic needs—and hope we’ll be too distracted to notice the $4.5 trillion tax giveaway to billionaires like Elon Musk and his Department of Greed and Ego.” Maybe. I hate the “while you were distracted by X, they were doing Y” because it might imply to someone lazy an order of moral hierarchy that may be backwards, e.g., “While you were distracted by the concentration camps, they were giving President Elon Musk plum government contracts.”
Still, I think tying things to economics is probably correct. Ms. Jayapal explicitly shouted out, “The rent is too damn high,” a classic meme campaign that should have singlehandedly reoriented Democratic messaging a decade ago. “This is the same old story. The rich bosses want to get richer instead of paying workers a living wage—while the rent is too damn high. Instead of paying their fair share in taxes—so we can have universal health care, child care, affordable housing.”
As she left the stage, the crowd chanted: “Ho ho! Billionaires have got to go!”
Rep. Ilhan Omar was next, and she came out on a tear: “We have a president stupid enough to believe a Photoshopped image. We have an administration stupid enough to admit to the Supreme Court that they made an error—and then refuse to fix it. We have an administration riddled with lawlessness, committing crimes every single day by disobeying the orders of the Supreme Court.”
It is always fascinating to see the excited reaction Ms. Omar gets from crowds, compared to the hate, nagging, and censure she gets from her own party. If she sometimes seems too fiery, Rep. Jeffries ought to wonder why that resonates better with the base than his more centered moral admonishments. Ms. Omar demands justice; Jeffries suggests we wait for God to be moved to grant it. Which of the two approaches encourages maximal agency to the people?
Ms. Omar continued, describing what feels like the final dimming of the shining city on a hill.
“I came to this country as an immigrant. And… [w]e’ve always believed that even if man takes away our rights, we’ll get our day in court, that the judiciary will function to protect our rights. So, when I see immigrants heartbroken, I get it. They believed in the ‘land of the free’ and the ‘home of the brave.’ And what are they seeing now? People becoming cowards. People refusing to stand up to this administration. The world is watching—and the beacon they used to look to for freedom isn’t shining anymore.”
Ms. Omar correctly identified the abduction of Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk from the crime of co-authoring an unfavorable op-ed as a key moment that ought to be seared into voters’ civic consciousness. “When a young woman is snatched in the street by masked men who won’t identify themselves, taken to detention with no family contact, no lawyer, no congressional notification—that image is terrifying. And it should be terrifying to us as Americans.”
She is correct—it is a terrifying image. Hollywood has long relied on it to establish dystopias in their opening acts. I thought, for a moment, of the V for Vendetta guy wearing the Handmaid’s Tale outfit—this was the opening scene in both the 2006 film and the Hulu series.
Becky Pringle recalled a battle cry from Brazil’s antifascist resistance between 2019 and 2022: “No one lets go of anyone’s hand.” She urged us to take it up here too: “Let that be our call. Don’t let go of anyone’s hand.”
Not just solidarity—clinging together for safety, like otters facing tides and currents while they sleep. I think of Partisan Hex in many ways: a meal ticket, an obligation, a public service, a t-shirt grift, a parody—but most importantly, a search for a slogan like that. A banger. A metaphor that instructs my fellow Americans on how to win against all this evil shit.
David Brooks, Tim Miller, and others have spoken about their allergy to words like solidarity. I am with them on that. I do not know if we are really a society that can be so conjoined in faith. I have heard several times now from friends of mine—not the establishment insider cucks or the Fort Meade boys, but the cool guys with leather jackets—who used to have mohawks that looked like peacocks and still wear ear gauges—that they are too afraid to give this administration hell the way they gave George W. Bush’s because they have “kids and shit.” I cannot quite blame them for prioritizing their own family’s safety over the fate of the world, but the more people who make that choice, the less safe we all are.
If you are a naturalized citizen, for example, you have likely noticed Marco Rubio—Secretary of State, Acting National Security Advisor, National Archivist, and USAID Administrator—gleefully telling any television camera he can find that they are denaturalizing motherfuckers for wrongspeak. YouTuber David Pakman’s lawyer advised him not to leave the country because there is real risk now at a port of entry. Some people—even actresses and academics—have found themselves relocated to awful detention centers for weeks because a border agent found sufficient errors in their paperwork.
It would follow, then, that many legal permanent residents of this country—who have taken actual oaths to the United States and made their lives here—have good reason to keep their dissent to themselves. A “normal gay,” as Vice President J.D. Vance would say, might ditch the “Protect Trans Kids” shirt, if it keeps them out of the line of fire. Assertive women may hold their tongues in hostile workplaces if they sense too much danger in “making things political.” Even I, at a conference called Principles First, wondered whether I might be safer deleting my blog and burning my papers. I would venture that most Americans have something so precious they would rather not fight than lose it. If the danger is legitimate, so too are the reasons to cower before it.
“Don’t let go of anybody’s hand!” For sure. But we must find our way to take each other’s hands first. We have to make an unnatural choice on a mass scale—to choose the well-being of strangers. Strangers who may be fickle, unworthy, bad people deserving terrible fates, or—worst of all—really cringe and woke. We must choose this mass of outcasts over our own lives, our families, our well-being, and security, knowing we are fucked if a critical number of others cannot come to the same conclusion.
Ms. Pringle closed with: “Despite all of it, we will create that beloved community, because the children are depending on it.” That feels like a more earned “we will win.”
I thought I might slip out to get an ice-cold Coca-Cola, but then they announced Senator Mazie Keiko Hirono. She had been walking among the crowd earlier, and told us how much she loved reading the signs—“especially the one that says, ‘Trump lies.’” Yeah, she added, “the minute he opens his mouth, that’s what comes out.” (I personally enjoyed a sign which read: “No human being is illegal. Except Trump.”)
I thought this was so important. We need elected officials to recognize the intensity of the pro-democracy coalition. It has been too easy for the world’s Gretchen Whitmers to fall into a compliant posture that obscures the existential risk of the moment.
Ms. Hirono said the “president [] wants to keep us divided, distracted, and in fear. And the thing that he fears the most is all of us coming together—understanding that by fighting back, by coming together, that is what’s going to defeat him. We know that.” This must be true—there are not many other options. “So this is a fired-up crowd… we are the #resistance. We are the change that needs to happen. And we need to keep showing up. Half the battle is showing up—not just in numbers like this, but to stay the course, to keep fighting back.”
I think anyone who has ever had a punctual-but-lazy coworker knows that simply showing up can be insufficient if all you do is warm a seat, but I also think my cynicism here is misguided. Rather than be powerless or indolent, Americans ought to come and stand in parks and clap like seals and cheer for union organizers if the only other thing they planned to accomplish that day was a video game binge. There is much more to do besides, but it matters that everyone who can comes and is counted when asked. (A minimum I, too, barely accomplished this time.)
Representative Maxwell Frost warned, “Authoritarians, when they get in power, they’re never satisfied with the power they have. So they do illegal things, they tiptoe outside the law, and then they look at the people. If the people are quiet, if the other party is quiet, they take it as a yes. They say, well, no one’s speaking out, so I guess I can continue to do it.”
This is probably why I have the compulsion against paywalling my content, despite the desire to be paid—nobody can ever say that nobody was speaking out because I am yapping on here all day, and I slip printouts of this newsletter into the mailboxes of some Republican interns in my neighborhood to make sure they are fully aware that I am talking shit.
I hope the rest of the Democratic establishment heard Mr. Frost when he said: “We’re not the minority, we’re the opposition. And when you don’t have all the power that you want, you use all the power that you’ve got.” Because I do worry. The faces of the party I see when I am in these streets is very different from the ones presented on the news, and I want to make sure the elected officials who talk from desks and hallways and not lecterns in the middle of the park are not preparing any additional capitulations.
I heard a chant several times that I thought had some heft: “What do we want? Justice. And if we don’t get it, shut it down.” Shut it down. There’s a pervasive allusion to a climactic general strike—enough so that it has started to feel like foreshadowing. I have prayed it will not come to that, because I have my doubts about the feasibility of a mass work stoppage. I know very few people who could comfortably tell their bosses, “I’m sorry, but I’m skipping work today to go stop authoritarianism.” I fear that if the great general strike whiffs—if we fail to summon the exact sum of people it would take to end an evil government—we will be extinguished.
And I think, before they opt against joining any #resistance, people ought to think about what an America with this administration’s enemies fully defeated will be like. There will be no Partisan Hex newsletter to read with the morning coffee. There may well be no morning coffee, if the tariffs on Colombia get too high. With strongly reduced immigrant labor pools, the hospitality, construction, and agriculture sectors of the economy will be just fucking wrecked, and buying any new houses, going on vacation, or even getting produce from the supermarket will be much more drastically inflated than anything President Joe Biden was ever blamed for.
I understand May is a month of heat and light, and that my funereal tone may seem undermining. I do not wish to throw shade on anyone’s sense of renewal or fire. When people shout, “We will win!” or “¡Sí se puede!”—I am only playing the role of the cynical cool guy when I evaluate the conditions under which we cannot. Only I am hesitant to treat victory as a guaranteed reward for doing all you can, when I think 2016 and 2024 should have taught us that things can go the other way, too. If we fail, it will not be for lack of warning, nor from insufficient motivation. It will be because too many of us—rationally, even understandably—decided to protect only what was ours, and if the sum of those choices exceeds the sum of those who overextended themselves in hope that others might do the same, then there may be no one and nothing left of America to hold onto.