No kings and other resistance
The specter of authoritarianism has hung heavy over the news headlines in the weeks since Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
Donald Trump celebrated the “indefinite suspension” of Jimmy Kimmel, promised more censorship of the media, openly called on his attorney general to prosecute his perceived enemies, forced the resignation of the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, and watched gleefully as his hand-picked replacement indicted former FBI Director James Comey on grounds so flimsy that conservative New York Times columnist David French wrote: “The Department of Justice is prosecuting a former director of the FBI . . . not because there is
More revenge is coming, Trump has promised.
Wrote journalist Edward Luce recently in the Financial Times, “A few months before the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Donald Trump is pulverizing the country’s founding principles with astonishing ease.”
Wrote Jonathan Blitzer in The New Yorker magazine, “The first nine months of Donald Trump’s second term have been a breakneck exercise in rebranding those disfavored by the White House as enemies of the state.”
Yet, though it received far less attention amid the dark headlines, resistance to Trump’s presidency, too, is showing signs of new life, starting with another massive No Kings protests nationwide scheduled for Oct. 18.
There have been signs of other forms of resistance emerging as well.
In New York City, elected officials and citizens practiced peaceful civil disobedience inside and out of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building as they tried to draw attention to the conditions of immigrants imprisoned there. Dozens, including state and city elected officials, were taken away in handcuffs.
A wildfire of impromptu boycotts against Disney and ABC forced the network to end Kimmel’s “indefinite suspension” quickly and abruptly. An attempt by the most conservative ABC affiliates to hold out also collapsed by week’s end as an unrepentant Kimmel drew huge audiences.
And also in New York City, prior to Kimmel’s reinstatement, mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani cancelled a town hall on a local ABC affiliate, adding to the pressure on the network.
Still, heartening as these actions were, the challenge now will be to expand and sustain all forms of peaceful protest if our democracy is to have a fighting chance of survival.
David Frum, in The Atlantic, noted that Trump’s “overall approval numbers have dropped to the very low 40s; his economic management, to the mid-30s. Grocery prices are up, and electricity prices are rising even faster.”
The president, in other words, is racing the clock to crush opposition. That makes him exceedingly dangerous, but also vulnerable.
Organizers of the resistance can’t stop with nationwide protests on Oct. 18. The path forward will demand planning, discipline and commitment beyond what we’ve seen to date.
Neither organizers nor participants, however, need to reinvent the wheel. The Civil Rights Movement, for example, provides plenty of enduring lessons of effective protest even as the Trump Administration scrambles to obliterate the history of this period from Smithsonian museums and National Parks.
The Montgomery Bus boycott of 1955-56 marked one pivotal moment. African-American passengers, sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to sit in the back of a bus, stopped riding the city’s buses. The boycott lasted 13 months and led to a Supreme Court decision that declared segregation of public transportation unconstitutional.
The Greensboro, NC, lunch-counter sit-ins followed in 1960. They began when African-American students demanded to be served at a Woolworth’s lunch counter and refused to leave when they were denied service. The movement spread rapidly. What began Feb. 1, 1960 as the action of four young men influenced by the non-violent protest techniques of Mahatma Gandhi, drew hundreds more by its fourth day. In a matter of months, it had spread to 55 cities in 13 states.
Even as scores were arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace, media attention grew and by that summer lunch counters and other facilities throughout the South had begun to be integrated. Today, the former Woolworth’s in Greensboro now houses the International Civil Rights Center and Museum.
In 1961, the Freedom Riders challenged Jim Crow laws and the non-enforcement of Supreme Court decisions by riding interstate buses in mixed racial groups throughout the South, sometimes facing violent beatings in response to their courage.
Those were dangerous times; civil rights leaders from Medgar Evers to Martin Luther King paid with their lives. Ultimately, however, the movement achieved wholesale changes in the law although, as we sadly still see today, hate continued to simmer beneath the surface.
If we choose to embrace them, the kind of sustained courage and determination repeatedly shown by Civil Rights leaders can light the way forward for our country in today’s dark times.
It won’t be easy. And time is short. The alternative, however, is unthinkable.