Massive "No Kings" Protest Of Angry And Determined Americans Across The Country On President's Day

But the legacy media keeps telling us the resistance is dead.

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Monday morning, President’s Day 2025, I picked up Lillian, one of Anastasia’s friends, and headed off to the mall to park my car and hop on the metro. We were heading into DC to protest, livestream said protest, and interview some fellow protesters.

I was originally going to go alone. As much as she despises Trump and the GOP, Anastasia is not big on crowds filled with yelling humans. She DOES like to interview people, though…

When Lillian, on the other hand, heard me mention I was heading in during Sunday’s D&D session, she pounced on the chance to go. She had wanted to go with her mother but since her mother works for the government, going to a protest under a fascist regime seems like a very bad idea and a great way to lose her job. When I asked her if she would be willing to interview people, she thought that would be a splendid idea.

And off we went into Washington D.C. in cold as fuck weather with blustery winds that made it sooooo much worse. If you’re familiar with DC, you know its geography makes it a wind tunnel, and when it’s cold? Ooooof. Brutal. Even bundled up with gloves, it was not pleasant.

When we first arrived at about 11:30, I was wondering if the weather was going to drive people away. It was bright and sunny but fucked up chilly. With only a couple of hundred people there, it wasn’t much of a crowd. That changed VERY quickly but we didn’t notice until later. Still, when we thought it was kind of dud, we decided to make the best of it and found a few people to interview.

Two caveats here: The wind REALLY screws with the audio so, apologies. And My 20-year-old camcorder’s batteries kept dying despite being fully charged so the third interview was cut short. The adult man with the group was discussing how a friend of his was working on a new device to combat cervical cancer and it’s on hold now because of the freeze on NIH grants. But I lost the last 30 seconds of what he was explaining so I cut that piece out. I am unamused with my ancient equipment and will be ordering fresh batteries and the wind to never blow again while I’m recording.

Lillian did an excellent job for her first time interviewing complete strangers. Go, Lillian!

I haven’t seen much about today’s protest in the news but I can tell you it was way larger than I was expecting. I can also tell you it was way WAY larger than the 50501 (50 Protests 50 States 1 Movement) organizers were expecting. Comically so. I actually felt kind of bad for them. They showed up with a little audio table, a microphone, and one little speaker.

They probably figured they would have, at most, 500 people? Several hundred in their wildest dreams. If there ended up being less than 5,000, I would be surprised. There’s a good chance the number was much higher.

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Lillian and I were having trouble judging the size of the crowd because we were in the middle of it. But we kept seeing large crowds of protestors (they were carrying signs and flags) coming to join and, what we really found amusing, we kept hearing competing chants from every side.

The crowd was so large that different parts couldn’t hear each other chanting, they were so far away. But we could hear them from the middle of it all. It was quite something.

The legacy press, predictably, had a different view of reality:

“More than a thousand” is a hell of a qualifier. That’s like saying Yankee Stadium holds “more than a thousand” fans. It’s not untrue but really isn’t an accurate picture.

That is, in fact, “more than a thousand.” Fuckers.

What I found very interesting is that no elected officials were there. No one recognizable was. It was just a couple of people from 50501 and a line of very angry protesters who had lined up to speak.

Here’s the livestream I did. The video is, again, awful (sorry), but the audio came out great. Also, I tried to stream horizontally for a bit before several people pointed out that the image was actually sideways. I guess Substack only allows vertical phones. Alas…

I think, perhaps, that since no “named names” are currently associated with 50501, no one is taking it seriously. Yet. And since it’s not an astroturf organization like the Tea Party or undermining the Democrats like the “Free Gaza” movement, the legacy press is mostly ignoring it.

But an awful lot of people are showing up for a movement with no media or political clout and no name recognition. A lot of very angry people.

I did not go out of my way to look for Luigis and I still saw a few. Lillian saw several.

You remember the Luigis, yes? Those would be the people who have taken the message of Luigi Mangione to heart: Deny, Defend, Depose. AKA: Violence against the rich is acceptable.

I wrote about them after the Treasury protest:

Nothing has changed. If anything, it’s getting worse. The longer Musk and Trump steal our money and personal data and strip away the government agencies WE pay for, the more violent the language is becoming around the solution to the problem.

Am I saying fascist billionaires and their sycophant enablers need to be gunned down like the animals they are? Nah. But I’m not going to shed a single tear when it inevitably happens. One does not leave a rabid dog to run amok. And Musk and Trump are nothing if not rabid.

I find it absolutely fascinating that this growing movement of enraged Americans is being mostly ignored and downplayed. I’m old enough to remember 25 idiots in Tricorne hats showing up to cry about being taxed too much garnering weeks of media attention. They ranted and raged about imaginary oppression and fairy-tale wrongs done against them.

Thousands of actual patriots show up to protest very real oppression and attacks on our freedoms by smug fascists openly bragging about their coup and the legacy press mostly takes a pass. Little too busy following Trump around, obediently chasing his latest shiny object. No time to report on real news about actual Americans with real concerns.

I have a guess that if this many people are willing to show up for a no-name protest in freezing cold weather, the second it gets warmer, the streets are going to be flooded with rage and there aren’t enough Proud Boys to do a fucking thing about it. Pete Hegseth will be too drunk or incompetent to have turned the military into an army of Christian Nationalists (and he won’t have enough time anyway). And the police aren’t going to open fire on tens of thousands of middle-aged white people chanting “Hey, Hey! Ho, Ho! Elon Musk has got to go!” Especially after DOGE (pronounced “dog-E”) cuts federal funding to police departments so Trump can pay for his $4 Trillion tax cut for billionaires.¹

Guess we’re going to find out if there’s going to be an American Spring in a couple of months.

There are 42 days until the first Blue Wave starts in Wisconsin and 259 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

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1. You don’t think that’s coming? You underestimate how fucking stupid these people are.