Protests by about five million people at two thousand sites

I watched my “Sunday” movie on Friday night at the Detroit Film Theater. It was Holy Cow, a French film (no, that’s not the French title). It is a coming of age story about Totone. It takes place in the rural Comté region of France, along the Swiss border. He and his besties like to drink, dance, and carouse. He also has a few enemies. Totone’s father (his mother is not in the picture) likes to drink and dance too and tries to drive himself home when he should have a designated driver and ends up dead. Totone is now in charge of a much younger sister. And is in desperate need of money. He hears that there is an annual contest for the best Comté cheese with a sizable prize. He decides he needs to win this contest. Never mind he’s never made cheese before (though I think his father has), doesn’t have any of the equipment, can’t afford the milk and other ingredients, and hits other major problems. At least he tries. He gets help from his besties and from the sister of one of his enemies. And through the effort he steps from boy to man. It’s a sweet tale and I enjoyed it very much. I went to the No Kings protest in the Detroit suburb of Livonia on Saturday afternoon. It was along the major streets on two sides of the Livonia civic center (city hall, police, library, community center, and court). Plenty of parking but by the time I got there the parking lots were full. I parked about a half-mile from the major intersection and the crowd along the street reached almost that far. There was no good place to get a photo to show the size of the crowd, though I have a few that hint at it. In this first photo one can sense the size of the crowd towards the right of the photo. This is still about a third of a mile from the main intersection.

This photo shows the crowd on both sides of the street.

My third crowd photo is towards the end of the protest and I’m walking back towards my car. The crowd still lines the street.

The organizers sent links to images participants could download. Many did. Many more came up with clever posters. I was able to get photos of some of them, which are below. Others, I’ll share the text as well as I remember it.

Seen across the street:

Other posters I saw: “It’s so bad even introverts showed up!” “The only monarch I want is a butterfly.” “If you have money for a parade you have money for Medicaid.” “Don’t make me do this again! – History.” “If cruelty isn’t the point, what’s the point of the cruelty?” “Childhood vaccines cause adulthood.” My poster: “Together we can trump Trump.” Likely the only people who saw it were fellow protesters. And a t-shirt I saw, though it doesn’t have anything to do with the protest: “To those who stole my anti-depressants I hope you’re happy.” This protest merely lined the streets. Sometimes there was some chanting. There were no speeches and no marching. The two major streets were in active use and a lot of people honked as they passed. There were a few pickup trucks with nasty guy flags that made passes, doing a good job of getting the crowd riled up. But that was the extent of the counter protests. I don’t have a count of how many showed up in Livonia. My guess is there were over a thousand people along the streets. Sister suggested I explain why the protests used the name No Kings. The nasty guy has been acting like a king, restrained by no one and able to issue whatever decrees he wanted. But this protest was to say we rejected a king in 1776 and are rejecting him as king now. Bill in Portland, Maine in his Cheers and Jeers column for Daily Kos used today’s column to show photos of the protest in his home town. An Associated Press article posted on Kos described a few of the protests in major cities. Dan K of the Kos community started a post with:

In political science, there’s something called the "3.5% Rule":

Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.

Dan added that in San Francisco, which he attended, may have had 100,000 people there, perhaps even 150,000. Thee were 2,000 protests across all 50 states, including some conservative areas. Minimum estimates are that 5 million people attended. Some sources suggest 10 million. Dan noted that 12 million is 3.5% of the US population. In my reading today I saw a link to a spreadsheet that lists attendance at many protests. It is a crowdsourced list, allowing certified users to list a city, the attendance, and the source of the count. It has a second list that anyone can edit, though supplying a source for their numbers. The more official tally is 3.16 million. Adding in the less official numbers and they tally goes up to 5.85 million. Alas, Livonia is not listed. Some of the big protests: Austin, TX, 20,000. Boston, half million. Chicago Dealy Plaza, 100,000. Eugene, OR, 20,000. Houston, 25,000. Los Angeles City Hall, 200,000. Mountain View, CA, 21,000. Manhattan, Fifth Ave. 200,000. Manhattan Bryant Park, 50,000. Philadelphia, 80,000. Phoenix, 20,000. Portland, OR, 20,000. Saint Paul, MN, 55,000. San Diego, 60,000. San Francisco, Van Ness Ave., 100,000. Seattle, 70,000. Sunnyvale, CA, 20,000. Tampa, 20,000. Torrance, CA. 20,000. The protests were held on the same day the nasty guy hosted a parade in Washington, DC to mark the 250th anniversary of the founding of the US Army in 1775. It also was the nasty guy’s 79th birthday and he has long wanted a parade. So most people say that is the real reason for the festivities. bilboteach of the Kos community wrote that the parade was a flop. Sparse crowds. Low energy (partly because of the heat and humidity). And the nasty guy looking either inconsolable or asleep. The Detroit Free Press posted a photo gallery of the parade. I’m not sure what a big military parade in the US is supposed to look like, so from these photos maybe this was OK? Then again, there aren’t many photos of the crowd or its lack. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin had a few good quotes. One is from G Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers, which is where I got the link to the spreadsheet. Dworkin quoted a tweet from Doug Landry. The quote was interesting enough that I went for the whole thread of 52 tweets laid out on Threadreader. Landry does events at the mall and was appalled how badly this one was organized. Too few entrance gates. Requiring people to cross roads on metal stairways and elevated crosswalks (a big hazard if lightning and a bother with strollers). And a parade with units with too much space between them and not enough bands. Dworkin quoted a tweet by Michael Shurkin.

I now have attended enough West Point parades to know the US Army can parade with the best of them. What we are seeing here is not an inability to do this with precision but a decision not to. Which is more interesting.

Max Boot of the Washington Post:

Rolling Stone headlined its story about the day: “Trump’s military birthday was a gross failure.” I think that’s right, but the flip side is that the Army’s military parade was an absolute success. In other words, Trump did not hijack the event. For the Army, this was mission accomplished. With night falling on Washington and the skies clearing up, I’m sure that the generals left the festivities with as much relief as I did.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat of the New York Times:

The scale of the mobilization in Los Angeles throws the Trump administration’s strategies into stark relief. The Los Angeles Police Department, the third largest force in the country, clearly stated it could handle the protests. A localized response by the L.A.P.D. would generate only a spate of familiar images, however; it could never capture the drama of a foreign invasion, or the history-making moment when Los Angeles became “occupied territory,” as the White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller wrote on X after protests began. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a former Fox weekend host, also depicted the L.A. protests as a collusion between an external enemy and the “violent mob” of protesters supporting this “dangerous invasion.” To show the public that order was being restored, Mr. Hegseth turned to a Marine infantry division that served in Iraq and Afghanistan, rendering Los Angeles into an open-air studio for the production of a show of force. The Trump administration is now using the second-largest city in the country as a backdrop for its efforts to create the perception of a national crisis. Doing so could allow it to justify measures that would empower the government to act against its own citizens.

In the comments are lots of cartoons and meme about the parade and the protests. One cartoon to mention is posted by Faith Jackson and is by Lalo Alcaraz. It shows a hooded man feeding a fire with lots of news cameras on him. Behind the cameras is a large crowd of protesters. The caption:

People outside of LA keep insisting the city is in anarchic turmoil. Maybe that's because a lot of mainstream media is only covering the fires and vandalism, and not the hugely peaceful protests. You know the old saying, "if it bleeds, it leads."

I intended to post this last evening. But Blogger on my Vivaldi browser wouldn’t play well with my Google Account. I can’t tell which was the problem. Google said I had to allow cookies and when I did it still wasn’t satisfied. Deleting cookies and rebooting didn’t help. I tried a chat session and ended up with Google Drive expert instead of a Google Account expert. The one I chatted with took a while to explain chatting can’t be done with an Account expert, something about privacy. That didn’t make sense. I filed a question with the Google Account community and as of this afternoon got no reply. Today I tried exploring Blogger help. Connections to Google Account seemed to get worse. I eventually found a help question similar to my situation. It suggested trying a different browser to verify whether the problem was or wasn’t Google Account. So I started up Edge. And it uploaded photos just fine.