No Kings in Tigard

I haven’t been out protesting since April 5th and this past Saturday the timing worked out for us again. I made my sign the day before. Pedro couldn’t decide what to put on a sign, so he brought a drum and wore his Gulf of Mexico shirt, that he bought specifically in response to president Dump’s changing of the name to Gulf of America.

Pedro told me on the way to the protest, that the little flag he carried was the one that was given to him at his naturalization. He is an understated man, and he didn’t say it but I believe he chose that flag intentionally. Pedro held that very flag the day he became an American citizen. Now he is fighting for his country’s integrity. He is the kind of immigrant that every country needs to realize they have. Immigrants make us BETTER.

The last time we protested in Tigard, Oregon, our hometown, my mind was BLOWN at how many people showed up. My guess is that it was more than 1,000 in April. This time my guess is more than 2,000. We stood next to an older couple that said they had come to every single Tigard protest, and this was the biggest by far. They thought it was double the April 5th turn out, which matched our impression, too.

Nationwide, there were over 2,100 registered NO KINGS protests. ACLU and Move On, two National organizations, both claim that there were 5 million protestors across the United States on Saturday. Alt National Park Service is a resistance organization that is not a federal organization but acts in defence of the defunding of National Parks and its employees, claims that there were over 12 million.

What is “No Kings?” Well, in one sense it’s a sort of tongue-in-cheek reference to the Revolutionary War, when this country fought for independence from Britain. That is a way to unify the country under a common understanding: we are all in agreement that as a democracy, our history reflects a rejection of the rule of a single person, and we still see ourselves as upholding those same values today.

It is a message that our president is acting like an absolute monarch, weilding supreme and unlimited power. When the federal Supreme Court rules against him, he just ignores it. He is a convicted felon, but that same Supreme Court declared him above the law (he conveniently obeyed that ruling), so he won’t suffer any consequences. He is enacting policies to make himself richer and the country poorer.

More specifically though, the protests are a direct counter action to president Dump’s stupid military parade. He said it was to celebrate the Army’s anniversary, and Flag Day, which are never big celebrations in this country. Everyone knows it was really to celebrate his 79th birthday, which was Saturday. Anyone with an ego as big as Dump’s ego would consider his own birthday a bigger celebration than anything else. At a time when our economy is in total upheaval, and 250,000 federal employees were fired by Dump, and the prices of groceries are making families go hungry, this moron decides to spend millions on a military parade. Who can you think of off the top of your head who parades tanks down main street just to impress people? Putin, Kim Jong Un, dictators and strong men. So many of us are disgusted with this megalomaniac.

Out of 2,100 separate protests, nearly all of them were peaceful. In Los Angeles, as most of us expected, National Guard members attacked protestors with batons and tear gas. Yes, in the US, it is now common to be attacked by our own military. (Federal Senator Alex Padilla was wrestled to the ground and handcuffed when he approached Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and tried to ask a question) Does this remind anyone of Tiananmen Square?

The country is angry about ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) right now. The administration changed the law so that ICE can now enter schools, churches, hospitals, courts, places of employement, wherever they want, and arrest and deport people. Immigration agents are going into churches, do you understand me? They are taking parents as they go to pick up their children at school. Immigrants who are not yet citizens, but are attending their scheduled court appointments in order to follow the laws toward eventually gaining citizenship…are now fair game. ICE agents go to courts in order to detain immigrants who are lawfully doing the right thing and upholding their court dates. In one case, a judge saw what was about to happen, and helped the immigrant and his attorney escape through a back door and that JUDGE was arrested. Without evidence or trial or notice to their families, people with brown skin are imprisoned in third party countries like El Salvador and Venezuela that Dump is paying to hold people, before anyone knows what happened. Then it’s practically impossible to get them back. In most cases, the people detained have been peaceful, law-abiding citizens (not criminals as media outlets are implying). A few communities have set up networks to alert each other, so that neighbors can fill the streets and fight off the ICE agents from taking families away. In one instance, ICE agents swarmed a restaurant that was filled with customers, and handcuffed half the staff of cooks, waiters, and dishwashers. The customers were furious and rose up and chased ICE out into the streets. There was an incident when ICE called in local police to protect them from citizens. This is how angry we are.

Of course our own media’s coverage is bad enough, because most media outlets are owned by corporations and corporations seem to pander to the president. It surprised me that recent BBC coverage of our American resistance has slanted lately, when they usually are more neutral. BBC has been taking the White House’s side for the past two weeks, saying that the National Guard and the Marines are needed to protect the safety of Americans, and deriding representatives of the protests. The truth, for anyone really interested, is that perfectly peaceful protestors have been repeatedly attacked in LA by the National Guard. There are videos and eye witness accounts showing our military shooting rubber bullets directly at peaceful people (a young solitary woman, and a journalist, to name just two). People in cars at a red light in LA watched the Guard pour in and then start shooting at them. People tried to flee from their cars and the Guard went ballistic on them saying the people had begun a riot. Do not believe your media. Instead, find TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube videos from real citizens, regular people on the streets who happen to have their cameras on, and they will show you what is really happening here. Every single protest so far has begun peacefully, and any that ended up in violence turned that way once the military arrived. Figure it out.

Knowing this, some people told us to stay home for our own safety. This is what we said:

The noise was constant, and it mostly came from cars driving by and honking. The people in the cars often were part of the demonstration, waving flags, holding No Kings signs out the windows, cheering, yelling, smiling.

• You can’t talk about legality when you voted for a felon
• No KKKings
• No Faux King Way
• I prefer my ICE crushed
• No Dick Tators
• When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty
• Fake King Real Threat
• No Kings Just Queens (meaning drag queens)
• Unwilling citizen in an idiocracy
• Due Process
• Honk if you love Rule of Law
• Honk if you ever drunk texted war plans (referring to Defense Secretary Hegseth)
• No Crown No Cake No ICE
• Dump is our employee, not our king
• ICE= immoral, criminal, evil

Alien vs Predator is the cleverest sign of the day. Immigrant aliens vs a convicted sexual predator, and also the name of a popular movie.

The day was shadowed with bad news. That morning, we received word that Minnesota Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were shot dead by a nutjob posing as a police officer, and Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette were also shot and in the hospital. They were all democrats. The maniac who shot them was at large for two days, but is now in custody. In Virginia, someone ran their car into the crowd intentionally. A peaceful protestor, Arthur Folasa Ah Loo, was killed in Utah when a person shot into the crowd.

I have heard estimates that there were 70,000 marchers in Portland, Oregon, the biggest city near me. Just like last time, there were separate protests attended by thousands, in every small suburb of Portland. Just like last time, there were separate protests across the state, even as soaked in red as rural Oregon is, I saw video from protests in places like Klamath Falls and Pendleton. I don’t know how on earth a person could verify the numbers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Alt National Parks’ estimate is the correct one.

In my opinion, the best change from the last protest we were in was that it took three days to hear news about protests in April, but protests were the #1 story over the weekend, beginning the day before and continuing all day long.

Right now, there is a sound byte making the rounds on TikTok as background audio for many joke videos. It’s the sound of tank tracks quietly squeaking as they roll past, crushing the streets of Washington, D.C. It not the squeaking that is wonderful. It’s the fact that it was so quiet out there, that the squeaks are easily heard.