Honk If You Feel Alone Against The Leviathan

There was a kindly older woman on the overpass that Saturday afternoon, wearing sensible blue New Balance shoes and a blue fanny pack. She wore a silver bob haircut and a warm smile and had waters for fellow protesters. She waved her sign toward oncoming traffic: THEY WILL PAY FOR THEIR CRIMES. 

This is the median pro-democracy American in the first year of the second Trump regime. Like many of you, I attended a No Kings rally on Saturday that emanated an entirely new and different energy than the rallies of 2017 and 2018, or even the protests in the first weeks of the second Trump term, when the richest man in the world had staged a successful coup of the U.S. government. 

The former protests were full of folks yearning for a return to political and cultural normalcy, driven by an absurd belief that we had not yet entered the void in the aftermath of 2016, that we could stop this fascist momentum and backtrack to a time when politics wasn’t an existential nightmare. It was at those early rallies that a woman criticized me for wearing a t-shirt that might have offended fascists. There was a path, people believed, back to boring neoliberal normality.

The latter protests – the ones against Elon Musk and his criminal DOGE hackers – were full of confusion and fear. No one had their bearings in a surrealist nightmare in which we had an unelected president. Congress had been nullified. Democrats howled and reeled and pointed at the rulebook as it burned at the feet of a tyrant. 

October’s No Kings rallies were different. People had their bearings. There was a widespread understanding – both at the rally I attended and the many rallies I watched unfold on the internet – that the mealymouthed norms enjoyers had no place here anymore, for there are no more norms. They’re all gone, and fuck, that might be a good thing. There was anger, visceral anger, about how the country had been sold to the highest bidders, how anti-constitutionalism had become normalized by the regime and its frothing allies on the Supreme Court. Republicans had told us for generations that it was us – their opponents – who hated America. The No Kings rallies rejected that framing. No, we said, it’s you who hate this country. It’s you who are committing crimes against it and its people. America has an enemy, and it is you. 

And like the lady’s sign said, there will be a day after today: The reaping, which is never as much fun as the sowing. 

Along with family and friends, I held a sign and waved it at oncoming traffic on an overpass near the Capital Beltway. Drivers’ responses were overwhelmingly positive. Honks of approval rained down on the hundreds who gathered there, adorned in red, white, and blue, smiling and laughing, claiming the patriotism that the left got in the national divorce. People rolled down their car windows and shouted thanks and keep it up and hell yeah, fuck Trump. Every age, every race, every gender, (almost) every type of vehicle would slow down, scan the signs, and say yes, this is how I feel too. It was in that moment that their sense of isolation – their doomerism, their wallowing, their hopelessness – was shattered, for there we were, a bunch of regular people holding hand-drawn signs saying we will never accept a monarch. 

My sense of hopelessness and loneliness was broken too. Every honk was affirmation, every smile, every thumbs up, every fist pump was a reminder that no one wants this repulsive regime born from the shit-filled gutters of fascist online culture. No one wants this outgrowth of a cultural cancer that spread via social media algorithms practically designed to tear apart representative democracy worldwide. No one wants these freaks doing authoritarian cosplay for the cameras. No one wants to face what appears to be the all-powerful sovereign, the Leviathan, by themselves. No one wants this goon squad. Beep beep. 

I welled up a few times. My throat tightened and a couple tears may have spilled out from behind my mirrored sunglasses because it felt so damn good to not be alone on my social media timeline, immersed in the open criminality of the people running the country, their disregard for human beings, their destruction of American society itself. It was nice to be free from their all-consuming nihilism for a couple hours. The joy of those who reject that nihilism did me good. Maybe it did for you too. Nothing engenders a sense of aloneness like online, and nothing counters that aloneness like doing that weird thing where you get your ass out of the house and meet other folks who also feel so terribly alone in the hollowness of their timeline-generated reality. 

Tesla drivers kept their eyes on the road, seemingly embarrassed to be driving a car made by the head of the international fascist movement. One lady driving a white late-model Tesla glanced sheepishly at the regime opposition on the side of the road and offered a half smile; I wished I had the chance to tell her she could be part of this too, despite her automobile choices. Bald men with wraparound shades driving Ram trucks weren’t thrilled to see pro-democracy protesters; I guess that shouldn’t come as a great surprise. One extremely divorced man in a silver Cybertruck gave us the finger as he rolled by. We laughed uncontrollably and pointed at him in his stupid truck designed for the apocalypse its designer wants so badly, and he yelled something indecipherable and drove away in a huff. A young guy in an early-2000s Volkswagen Beatle flipped me off. I blew him a kiss and he stiffened and turned away and didn't look back.

No Kings is a real movement. It’s one for normies and savvy, cynical leftists and avowed Marxists and former Republicans and Hillary Clinton dead enders and bitter Bernie bros and Obama adorers and those smug enough to have voted for Gary Johnson in 2016. It’s a movement that can include Jill Stein voters, if there are any that don’t come in the form of social media accounts controlled by Russian bot farms, or RFK Jr. primary supporters who voted for the guy because they couldn’t pronounce their cereal ingredients. Anyone who has been fooled by one of the many Russian psyops of the past decade can jump in. No Kings will even have Ralph Nader 2000 voters. In this way No Kings is a wildly good faith movement. The No Kings folks mean what they say. 

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It is the answer to the bone-rattling bad faith of the so-called Tea Party movement, an astroturf psyop funded by right-wing billionaires to create the appearance of organized, sustained opposition to Barack Obama’s centrist administration. The Tea Party was never real, just as Trump’s 2016 was not real at the start. Yet the Tea Party was covered by media outlets as real because it made for an easy-to-understand political narrative and because the media refs had been worked so brutally – had so many media teeth knocked out by Republicans – that they felt shamed and pressured into taking seriously the fake right-wing backlash to the nation’s first Black president. And so this totally invented reactionary movement dominated American politics for years, normalized the idea of Obama as some sort of unhinged leftist lunatic determined to end the United States through healthcare subsidies and Cash For Clunkers, and it left spineless congressional Democrats frozen in terror, shitting their pants, and wasting an opportunity to transform the fundamental underpinnings of a government founded on the perpetuation of white supremacy. 

The Tea Party, unlike No Kings, did not mean what it said. Its organizers – longtime Republican operatives paid by billionaire corporate polluters and Wall Street vultures – said Tea Party protesters were oh-so-worried about taxes and federal spending and the deficit or whatever the fuck people say when they need that shit to matter. These folks had not been so worried about the deficit when George W. Bush signed into law the most obscene tax cuts in history. But now they were worried. So worried. Spending had to be cut. Medicaid needed to be slashed. Not one more cent should be given to Big Bird and the socialists in the den of left-wing sin known as Sesame Street. This is what Tea Party people pretended to believe: Poor people shouldn’t be allowed to see a doctor and 0.00000000000000001 percent of the federal budget should stop going to public television because Elmo told kids not to be total assholes. 

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If Tea Party protesters were to have acted in good faith, they would have told the cameras at their sparse rallies that they had been shaken by Obama’s ascension, that they were afraid of a United States inching away from its white supremacist roots, one in which fairness and freedom and meritocracy would be valued and cherished and promoted by those in power. They would not have spoken in bad faith about budget deficits created exclusively by Republican presidents, but in good faith about their soul-corroding fear that they would wake up tomorrow and not be atop the hierarchy of oppression. They would have said plainly: Like my fear-sick ancestors and their fear-sick ancestors, I am afraid of the Other treating me the way I have treated them. I would rather die than cede my place in this hierarchy. 

That the Tea Party was contrived of a thousand combinations of bad faith didn’t matter. In those days – hopeful days, after the darkness of the Bush years – we had to pretend as if there was a mass movement of Americans opposed to the new president’s moderate and perfectly reasonable agenda. The capitulation of mainstream media outlets and the propaganda of right-wing cable news made it real for you and me and everyone else. But it was never real; it was created for TV and for a Republican Party that could no longer compete on a national stage. I saw that firsthand in September 2009 at the University of Maryland's College Park campus at a rally for the Affordable Care Act, where we expected Tea Partiers to counterprotest the event in huge numbers. I imagined thousands of angry Republicans who would face down us libs, one to one.

I counted nine elderly folks calling themselves Tea Party protesters that evening. Three of them wore grim reaper costumes for Party City. One of them complained about the reaper mask being stuffy and uncomfortable. They chanted about death panels, a fabricated attack on the ACA as some sort of grandma-killing national healthcare operation. At least ten thousand people walked past this group as the president called for slightly better healthcare access in the richest nation on earth.

There are folks out there irritated that No Kings doesn't have a Leslie Knope-style checklist of goals for whatever comes after the make-believe authoritarianism of Donald Trump. They want No Kings to Stand For Something, to have an agenda on housing and healthcare and taxes and labor rights. That's missing the whole point though. No Kings has an agenda, a beautifully broad and worthy one: To bring down a regime that doesn't recognize any limits on its power and to tell the listless god-king and his backers that monarchy is not and never will be on the menu in the United States. It's not an option. Honk if you agree.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.