Progressive Grieving Festival

No Kings Failure

So, they rallied on October 18 under the banner of “No Kings”. Before I tear into these rallies, let me provide some compliments.

The left is facing very bad public relations as being a bunch of violent radicals hating America. These rallies softened such an image with little old ladies and hand-drawn signs and US flags. The “No Kings” banner was accessible for people to grasp and encouraged people to attend, including some Trump supporters. (Keep in mind, just because someone supports Trump does not mean they agree with everything he does.) Of course, you could easily spot the radicals if you looked carefully at the signs.

Also, the rallies were peaceful. Hopefully, this defuses future violence and results in fewer hostile interactions.

Now for the bad part. These rallies served no beneficial political purpose but served as a coping mechanism as anti-Trumpers grieve over the current political situation. It reminds me of the Ghost Dances of the 19th century (https://www.legendsofamerica.com/na-ghostdance/) when Native Americans grieved at their losses to the hordes of European settlers coming into the Americas. The dances were a ritual in a spiritual hope of the return of the buffalo and the removal of settlers. Ironically, Wovoka, the spiritual leader of the Ghost Dance movement, was a Christian and had the name Jack Wilson.

The Democrat Party has been taken over by progressives and is steadily losing support. They lost Robert F. Kennedy Junior and Tulsi Gabbard, former Democrat presidential candidates. They are also losing registered voters (https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5462604-voter-registration-shift-democrats/). These rallies were an attempt to stop the losses, but the New York City mayoral race is likely to accelerate the exodus.

Also, while I have doubts about the 7,000,000 million attending, the fact is the largest numbers were in the typical progressive large urban centers such as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Minneapolis, and other such places, which could easily have rallies over 250,000 people attend. This means the movement is not as broad as it claims to be, but more of an urban phenomena.

This might hit people odd, but these rallies seemed largely racist in character as White Boomers were reliving the Woodstock era and Martin Luther King. Few people of color showed up. For Black America, deporting illegal immigrants is good. For many Hispanic Americans, getting rid of the criminals is good. Yet, these White Progressives want to talk about slavery and social justice when Black Americans have moved up, moved out, and moved on, and Hispanic Americans put the roof on your house.

The source of this phenomena appears to be from the media structure in the United States. The corporate legacy media still runs and has expanded with the “if it bleeds, it leads” type of reporting, even when it contains falsehoods (https://pepperdine-graphic.com/opinion-if-it-bleeds-it-leads-the-modern-implications-of-an-outdated-phrase/). But information in the internet age operates exactly in the opposite direction. Instead, if it leads, it bleeds as people research and counter what has been said with additional information. This is why finding reliable sources of information is very difficult and hard to sort through.

But most of the people attending these rallies do not know this and continue to listen to corporate legacy media, even if they do not take it at face value. The result is they still end up in an echo chamber (https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/communication-and-mass-media/echo-chamber-effect) and subject to the certainty illusion, where a person thinks they cannot be wrong about what they know.

This illusion casts an arrogant and visceral reaction to any information contrary to the narrative put forth by the corporate legacy media. Contrary information is blocked, and messages are DWR, deleted without reading. This is pure self-censorship and contributes to tribalism.

The rallies happened, but I am not certain they will have any meaningful impact. Time will tell.