A las Barricadas
More comments in advance of “No Kings Day” Peaceful Protests on June 14, 2025
No Kings is a nationwide day of defiance. From city blocks to small towns, from courthouse steps to community parks, we’re taking action to reject authoritarianism —and show the world what democracy really looks like. — Excerpt from the NO KINGS DAY Organizers’ Statement
“The essential work of democracy is being trashed by the rule-or-ruin politics of the MAGA party,” Senator Jamie Raskin(D-MD) proclaimed in a statement recently honoring Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith’s famous Declaration of Conscience delivered to Congress 75 years ago in response to the scourge of McCarthyism. “This is not a partisan exercise we are engaged in today to save and strengthen democracy in America…MAGA and {the Department of Government Efficiency} are engaged in a hostile takeover of all the political institution and programatic achievements of American democracy…Here in America we have a supreme Constitution, not a supreme leader. Democracy is not just a static collection of rules and practices. It is an unfinished project in motion, a constant work in progress. And we must never forget that democracy is the political system in service of human freedom.”
This Saturday, June 14, 2025, the day Indivisible designated as NO KINGS DAY, Americans nationwide will again take to the streets to protest the actions of the hostile MAGA forces now engaged in the Republican coup to destroy the blessings of freedom as set forth in the Constitution, our voices and signs expressing our democratic aspirations and resolve as we “bear true faith and allegiance” to the rule of law rather than the dictates of one man and his sycophantic, fascist enablers. United in resistance to tyranny, we press onward, rejecting defeatism while focusing on doing what’s right in alignment with the provisions of the Constitution. The point is to deal with the MAGA threat according to Thomas Jefferson’s famous quip: “In matters of style, swim with the current, in matters of principle, stand like a rock.” In short, we either beat ‘em or die trying. The refusal to accept fascist rule over the rule of law is a “no matter what” call to do the “next right thing” as exhibited by the likes of great American generals such as Anthony McAuliffe who replied to the Nazi surrender order during the Battle of the Bulge with one word of defiance: “Nuts!” Reflecting McAuliffe’s response to fascism we stand together to say there simply ain’t no way in Hell that we can consider living under the thumb of Donald Trump and his armies of mindless MAGAts. In the end, it’s a matter of principle. As Chris Hedges once said, “I don’t fight fascists because I think I can win; I fight fascists because they’re fascists.”
In The Contrarian, June 2, 2025, Jennifer Rubin writes, “In a single administration, there have never been so many intellectually shortchanged figures, ethically compromised lawyers, and emotionally unhinged conspiratorialists (from Kash Patel to Ed Martin to Stephen Miller)…It is no coincidence that Trump chose them. ‘Authoritarianism is the conversion of rule of law into rule by the lawless. He seeks the people with those skill sets on his side,’ historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat explained. ‘If a narcissistic, amoral, unhinged, and vengeful criminal (convicted of 34 counts) wants his wishes executed, he is going to surround himself with people as bonkers as he is.’”
Electing such a man as president reflects our collective poor judgment and reveals how the allegiance of the Republicans is absurdly misplaced amongst some egregiously unsavory characters. Rubin also cites Ed Kilgore’s point that the legacy media has refused “to hold the president accountable allowing the rationalization of the 47th president’s worst impulses.” In the absence of a rational consensus amongst our government leaders that our wannabe Emperor not only has no clothes and that he’s a clear and present danger to the peace and security of the entire world order, it’s up to us, we, the People to sound the alarm. Hence, the protests here in Delaware on June 14, which are part of an anticipated 1,800 protests nationwide on “the biggest day of protests so far this year,” according to Thats Another Fine Mess author Tom Cleaver.
What this resistance boils down to in practical terms is respect for the truth expressed in our collective refusal to betray the rule-of-law system of evidence-based democratic governance that has defined America for 250 years, and rejecting the demands of fascists who base their proposals for revolutionizing government on lies. Powerful examples of the mendacity of the MAGA Republicans are revealed in the chicanery surrounding the budget reconciliation bill now in congress. The rank perfidiousness of it all is documented by Heather Cox Richardson in Letters From An American, June 3, 2025. “While the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says the cuts mean more than 10.3 million Americans will lose health coverage,” Richardson writes, “House speaker Mike Johnson has claimed that those losing coverage will be 1.4 million unauthorized immigrants, but this is false…MAGA Republicans claim their ‘One Big, Beautiful Bill’ — that’s its official name — dramatically reduces the deficit, but that too, is a lie.”
Lying is apparently what the MAGA Republicans do best. While Trump proclaims on social media that the US economy is “BOOMING!”, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD says otherwise. The conflicts in conclusions about the reality of the Trump administration’s economic performance is the result of the MAGA policy to lie about everything in order to sow doubt and proliferate misinformation designed to placate the rubes who believe Trump is fulfilling his fascist promise to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. Just for the record the OECD’s report shows that Trump’s insane trade war is slowing economic growth, not accelerating it. Economic growth in the US is predicted to decline from the current level of 2.8% to 1.5% by 2026, according to the OECD. Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reports that the budget reconciliation fiasco will ad 2.4 trillion to the deficit in the next decade because spending cuts do not offset the proposed tax cuts for the rich.
“Taken together,” writes Richardson, “these studies illustrate how Trump’s economic policies are designed to transfer wealth from consumers to the wealthy and corporations. From 1981 to 2021, Republican policies moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. After Biden stopped that upward transfer, the Trump administration is restarting it again, on steroids…On Thursday, May 29, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed the measure would carry out ‘the largest deficit reduction in nearly 30 years with $1.6 billion in mandatory savings.’ She echoed forty years of Republican claims that the economic growth unleashed by the measure would lead to higher tax revenues, a claim that hasn’t been true since Ronald Reagan made it in the 1980s.”
The same dishonesty is driving the machinations surrounding the budget reconciliation bill, but ironically the truth about it emerged in a tweet from deep inside the MAGA camp. “In truth,” writes Robert Hubbell in the June 4, 2025 Today’s Edition Newsletter, “the Big Beautiful Bill is a sham designed to provide cover for an obscene tax cut for billionaires, millionaires, and corporations. Nothing more, nothing else. But to deliver that tax cut, Republicans are assaulting the safety net of the American people and exploding the deficit. Everyone knows the truth about the Big Beautiful Bill. On Tuesday (June 3), Elon Musk spoke the truth for about 15 seconds in a tweet. But that 15 seconds confirmed what everyone was thinking. The Big Beautiful Bill is a sham and a disgrace…Musk tweeted:
I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore.
This massive, outrageous, pork-filled congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination.
Shame on those who voted for it:
You know you did wrong. You know it.
Since the start of the second Trump administration, Americans by the millions have taken to the streets to proclaim their disgust with their chants and signs from coast to coast. The good news is our local and national politicians are getting the message. Heather Cox Richardson, after reporting Musk’s tweet in her popular Letters From An American wrote: “Meanwhile, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) released a report showing that Musk’s net worth has increased by more than $100 million since election Day. The report listed the many ways in which he used his position in the federal government to stop investigations into his companies, undercut regulations, win federal contracts, gain access to data and sensitive information, attack his enemies, meddle in elections, and secure foreign deals, all without informing the American people of his conflicts of interest.”
In early June, as the nationwide NO KINGS DAY drew closer, Musk and Trump, America’s Fascist Bro-Emperors, launched an ugly public spat which ironically provided enough evidence of the criminality of both actors to make the case, not only for Trump’s impeachment, but Elon Musk’s prosecution on multiple Federal charges. For example, Musk’s admission that he “bought” Trump’s presidency and subsequent control of the congress would be enough to start the wheels of justice turning in a functioning democracy. As Heather Cox Richardson described the essence of Musk’s involvement in US presidential politics, “Musk invested about $290 million into the 2024 election vowing to elect Trump in order to get rid of government investigations into his businesses he worried would “take {him} down’.”
Musk’s investment turned out to be a mixed blessing as his alliance with Trump fell apart, creating a situation that presents a golden opportunity for applying the rule of law, and as Moira Donegan, US columnist for The Guardian suggests in her June 6, 2025 Opinion Column, “It presents a unique opportunity for Democrats, who now have an unprecedented opening to kill the Trump bill, exploit instability in the Republican coalition and widening fractures within the MAGA coalition, and remind their voters that the Trump regime is not only corrupt but also incompetent - spiteful, petty and unable to agree on anything except for a shared desire to loot the government and deprive the people for the sake of further enriching the billionaire class.”
As the midterms approach, bear in mind that the Republican enabled Supreme Court produced this abomination of inequality, as Thom Hartmann points out in his June 7, 2025 Substack report: “The only reason Trump is president and Musk was able to spend the money to get him to the White House is because five corrupt on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court in 2010 decided that unlimited billionaire and corporate money in our elections would be a good thing. John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Anthony Kennedy, and Antonin Scalia sold our nation out for the spiffs they, themselves were getting from the country’s billionaires and it’ll take a generation for America to recover from this disgusting, stabbed-in-the-back Citizens United decision.”
The legions of outraged Americans in the streets in recent weeks are railing against the corruption and stupidity of a ruling class dominated by grifters, politicos and sycophants of the corporate rich that have replaced the open democratic society established during the New Deal era with a despotic empire that is now clearly in its death throes. As Chris Hedges points out in The Rule of Idiots, his June 6, 2025 Substack report, “These idiots, who promise to recapture lost glory and power, do not create. They only destroy. They accelerate the collapse. Limited in intellectual ability, lacking any moral compass, grossly incompetent and filled with rage at established elites who they see as having slighted and rejected them, they remake the world into a playground for grifters, con artists and megalomaniacs. They make war on universities, banish scientific research, peddle quack theories about vacines as a pretext to expand mass surveillance and data sharing, strip legal residents of their rights and empower armies of goons, which is what the U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has become, to spread fear and ensure passivity. Reality, whether the climate crisis or the immiseration of the working class, does not impinge on their fantasies. The worse it gets, the more idiotic they become.”
The protest pictures posted on this site so far reflect the nation’s rapidly growing collective outrage and disgust about what’s going on. Ironically, like Elon Musk, a major enabler of the MAGA injustices, Americans are having a collective Howard Beale moment and saying they “can’t take it anymore,” and can no longer tolerate, not only the “disgusting,” “pork-filled abomination” known as Trump’s Big Beautiful tax cut for the rich, but the whole Trump clown show posing as a presidency, a fiasco that Lucian Truscott calls “the private club” that doesn’t include we, the people as members. It’s absurd and it’s insane. When Trump called out the National Guard without a request from the California governor Gavin Newsom, who then accused the Trump administration of trying to “manufacture a crisis” he exposed the president’s weakness so everyone could see the attempt on the part of Trump’s minions to provoke violence in the ranks of protestors in order to warrant the invocation of Martial law. Adding more fascist fuel to Trump’s phony fire, The Guardian reported on Monday night that 700 marines will be deployed to Los Angeles, another unnecessary move that’s part of the president-in-name-only’s intention “to inflame” the protests in LA, as US House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries commented.
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) said it all in a statement released after marines were deployed on Monday. “Here’s what you need to know about what’s going on in Los Angeles. The state and city have the means to control the protests. Donald Trump is getting involved to intentionally make the situation more violent. And potentially to create a pretext for some sort of martial law.”
Meanwhile, Governor Newsom said: “U.S. marines serve a valuable purpose for this country—defending democracy. They are not political pawns. The Secretary of Defense is illegally deploying them onto American streets so Trump can have a talking point at his parade this weekend. It’s a blatant abuse of power. We will sue to stop this. The courts and Congress must act. Checks and balances are crumbling. This is a red line—and they’re crossing it. WAKE UP!”
The situation is dire and ridiculous with only one sure way of setting things right: the arising in solidarity of organized Americans bound together in peaceful protests nationwide until the Trump regime is driven out of power. All of Trump’s moves are unconstitutional and outrageous, but it’s important to emphasize that peaceful protest, not violent backlash, is the best tactic for resisting his fascist assault on the rule of law. As Robert Hubbell suggests in Today’s Edition Newsletter: De-escalate, Redirect, Overwhelm…No Kings Day takes place on June 14. Every American who values our democracy must show up in the streets, town squares, freeway overpasses, government buildings, parks, malls, parking lots — anywhere our voices can be heard. We need tens of millions of Americans protesting in thousands of locations. Trump and his enablers can’t possibly keep up with overwhelming, decentralized protests.” And finally, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat makes clear in the June 8, 2025 Lucid, “Weak authoritarians fear empathy, a sense of justice and morality, love for others and collective action. All they have is force and lies. They may feel immensely empowered right now, but those protesting them are on the right side of history. A reckoning will come for the aggressors as more Americans open their eyes to the criminal nature of this administration.”
Before the protestors gather on Saturday with their signs raised and the photo ops commence, it’s worth noting that many of us out on the streets railing against Trump and his MAGA fascists are standing in solidarity with our fellow citizens, bound in good faith by the oath we swore as active duty members of the military and/or government employees to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” a category that now includes a substantial number of bad actors The Contrarian Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Rubin describes as Americans who “abuse power, unleash the military on civilians, spread disinformation, advocate for an America defined by race and religion, stage an insurrection to overturn the results of a free and fair election, attack the rule of law, threaten judges, undermine science, weaponize the judicial system against political enemies, strip fellow Americans of long-established constitutional rights, intimidate the free press, denigrate women, grotesquely expand the powers of the presidency, or ally the United States with international dictators” — all aberrant actions Donald Trump and his MAGA minions construe as virtues comprising the warped “warriors ethos” espoused by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Most folks I know support Rubin’s point that the term “warrior” in the context it is used by the racist Hegseth “has lost all meaning” and that “Americans should resist MAGA’s demented vision of America at every turn, insist on preserving military values (“Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage”), and defend the attributes (e.g., diversity, excellence, character, rule of law) that have made the United States armed forces the most formidable fighting force in history.”
Unfortunately, the new professionalized military we have now doesn’t reflect the aforementioned “old school” values from the good old days when the military was strictly nonpartisan. Here’s a reality check via Tom Cleaver, author of the indispensable Thats Another Fine Mess: “Yes, the United States military is supposed to be non-political,” he writes, “swearing allegiance to the Constitution, not to an individual. But it must be understood where the majority of the military comes from, at least those members who are white. They come from the rural red states…and in the past three elections, these people voted for Donald Trump. And so did the active duty military: 55-60% of enlisted troops voted for him in 2016, 2020, and 2024. The American military IS political, like it or not, whether they are supposed to be or not.”
With that said, the stage is set for the story that will continue to unfold this Saturday and throughout the summer — the sordid account of the 45-million dollar Flag Day parade and the fake emergency created by Donald Trump in Los Angeles when he deployed federal troops in violation of federal law and without justification. There’s nothing new here on Herr Trump’s part, a man who “has always managed his public affairs by projecting dominance in a fake world,” as Heather Cox Richardson deftly describes the president’s public relations policy, which she also notes has “been compared to the kayfabe of professional wrestling.” As the Trump administration alters the traditional nonpartisan role of the military and seeks to use its power against the American people, it is more important than ever to stand together against the tyranny provoked by Trump and his malignant MAGA forces. With democracy at stake, fealty to the rule of law is our greatest ally in this fight. Robert Hubbell’s concise summary of the situation makes the case: “Trump’s declaration of emergency is an attempt to create an emergency justifying the deployment of troops. It is an illegal, unjustified use of the US military—and is grounds for impeachment, conviction, and removal from office.”
To The Streets!!!