I don’t think there’s a consensus but here are my feelings, which are not fully baked thoughts:

I’ve seen some people doom spiraling and thinking is going to blood in the streets from people getting mowed down by troops and feds

Idk, I can’t help but be suspicious that some of this is just comfortable liberal white Americans having Main Character Syndrome. The feds simply don’t need to mow a bunch of toothless protestors down to achieve Fascism, because America is already fascist. And the way to make America more fascist is to militarize against leftist protests because the liberals will side with the Trump administration against the Left. No Kings is not by any stretch of the imagine “leftist” or even “antifascist”.

As for utility, same as a lot of other protests: what utility, if any, that there is is in using it as an opportunity to try pulling liberals into more radical organizations where they can then be deradicalized out of the extremely violent extremist position that is status quo western chauvinism.

TBH I personally don’t fuck with these protests or the people who go to them in part because I worry that I won’t make them more radical, they’ll just co-opt what radical messaging I try to spread and still use it for their American-Supremacist neoliberal project. Just really disillusioned with all the people I saw spouting radical antifascist rhetoric from 2016-2020, some even 2022, and then being silent, or saying “it’s complicated”, or defending the Democrats because Trump would be “more fascist”, when it came to the most fascist thing we’ve seen in our lifetimes: the West’s live-streamed Holocaust in Palestine. I think it’s not a bad idea for actual orgs to hold a separate but related protest near it and run into the “No Kings” protest to attract attention and show that the left is willing to rise to the occasion and go out against Trump too, so that anti-Trump people don’t have to default to organizing with liberals. While still making it clear that this is SEPARATE, otherwise they’ll just lend the liberals street cred and help the libs co-opt radicalism. But that’s for orgs to do. My efforts in going to big lib protests to spread the gospel of leftism as an individual were that I achieved nothing.

My most bitter thought is this:

I hesitate to even say this outside of the empoc space but I kind of just don’t care about the No Kings shit general given that the vast majority of the violence that the American State does is still to people outside the country and to many of these people, that just doesn’t matter. 2 years of genocide and I didn’t see these “No Kings” people out on corners holding homemade signs calling for peace, but Trump saying inchoate gibberish is bad enough to get them to set the time aside? (but their protest is still very nonconfrontational). What the fuck. To hell with their fears. I just don’t care. What matters is keeping people alive.

A common criticism I heard from liberals and conservatives about Occupy was that it was too unfocused and vague so it wasn’t even able to send a very clear message. Well, how much more unfocused is “No Kings”? How much more vague? I view this as more Russiagate Liberals LARPing as brave members of the resistance.

There’s more to ramble, but fuck it, there’s books to read and Hades II to play. Did you know you can pet a cute

minor Hades II spoiler for the beginning of the game

frog

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