This is an adapted excerpt from the June 11 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
All over the country this week, regular people are mobilizing against Donald Trump’s overreach. Both against his reckless, destructive efforts to detain law-abiding neighbors in communities from coast to coast, and also his decision to mobilize the National Guard and the U.S. Marines against peaceful demonstrators in Los Angeles.
We are already seeing folks taking to the streets, demonstrating against what is happening in their country, from Los Angeles to New York City to El Paso, Texas, to Raleigh, North Carolina. And this weekend, there will be nationwide protests to counterprogram Trump’s North Korean-style military parade on his 79th birthday. Those protesters have a simple message: We have no king in America.
Protests against cruelty and for our shared values are a good thing and never more so than in the face of an authoritarian threat to our most cherished liberties.
The constitutional right to protest exists for a reason. It feels odd to have to say this, but protests are good. Protests against cruelty and for our shared values are a good thing, and never more so than in the face of an authoritarian threat to our most cherished liberties.
To be clear, any debate about the optics of peaceful protest, or whether demonstrators are just playing into Trump’s hands, obfuscates the fact that people should be peacefully protesting against the ongoing attempt to end American democracy.
It’s an attempt that began on the first day of Trump’s term —when, as one of his first official acts as president, he pardoned every single participant in the violent insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Even the people who assaulted police officers, even the people convicted of seditious conspiracy against our country.
However, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi, that’s different somehow. When Bondi was asked about the double standard of the president pardoning Jan. 6 rioters while going after protesters in Los Angeles, the attorney general said the situation was “very different.”
“These are people out there hurting people in California right now,” Bondi said. “This is ongoing — no longer. We’re going to protect them. We’re going to do everything we can to prosecute violent criminals in California. California is burning. These people are waving Mexican flags, yet they don’t want anyone to go back to Mexico. They’re burning American flags. This is the United States of America, and we’re going to protect Americans. We’re going to protect all citizens out there.”
She is absolutely misrepresenting the protests in California. The Constitution protects waving a Mexican flag at a protest. (Also, if foreign flags require the National Guard, I have bad news for members of Congress.) But perhaps most importantly, the Jan. 6 rioters hurt people, they assaulted police officers with bear spray and Tasers and flagpoles.
Those pardons made it crystal clear, if it wasn’t already, that Trump doesn’t care a whit about law and order. That is not what any of this is about. He is federalizing the National Guard and sending Marines into the streets of Los Angeles because he wants to silence any dissent by force.
It’s clear Trump is scared of mass public opposition to him, and that’s why his own White House is outright lying about the protesters. On Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president “supports the right of Americans to peacefully protest” and “supports the First Amendment,” but she claimed “that is not the majority of the behavior that we have seen taking place in Los Angeles.”
That is just totally divorced from reality. In fact, the opposite is true. The overwhelming majority of protesters in Los Angeles have been peaceful.
But you would not know that from watching Fox News, which has been breathlessly covering the protests as if Los Angeles were at risk of burning to the ground any second now.
The White House even put out its own video, selectively editing a handful of moments from about two city blocks to make it look like the entire city of Los Angeles is burning to the ground. It is not.
Yes, a few people threw bricks and lit cars on fire. They should not do that. They also don’t speak for the vast majority of demonstrators who have been entirely peaceful. Those people should keep demonstrating peacefully. This is why the right to “peaceably assemble” exists, as enshrined in the very First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The people don’t wield the power of the state. What the people have is the ability and the right to go out in the streets and yell and petition their government, and, yes, peacefully assemble. You are allowed to publicly disagree with the government in this country. In fact, the American tradition of protest predates America itself. We all learned about the Boston Tea Party in school. Basically everybody today understands that the protests for racial justice in the mid-20th century were one of the most effective mass mobilizations in our country’s history. Those protesters knew that while legal challenges to segregation were part of the solution, tangible, nonviolent direct action was an equally necessary strategy. That same formula was replicated in the mass opposition to the Vietnam War later in the 1960s, which ultimately forced President Lyndon Johnson out of the 1968 presidential race. During each of those periods in history there were, almost without exception, some protesters who might have gone too far, or did something they shouldn’t have done. There were endless debates about whether people were mobilizing in the right kind of way. Folks may already be waking up to the fact that Trump is on the wrong side of history. In 1961, for example, nearly 60% of Americans said that lunch counter sit-ins and Freedom Riders were hurting the integrationist cause, according to Gallup. It is only with hindsight that we are able to see just how effective those protests really were. In this case, though, folks may already be waking up to the fact that Trump is on the wrong side of history. A new Quinnipiac poll shows Trump underwater by 11 points on immigration and down 16 points on deportations. Clear majorities oppose both, outside the poll’s margin of error. In another victory for the right to protest, on Wednesday a judge ruled that recent Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, who is currently being held in Louisiana, cannot be detained or deported over his protected free speech during campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. It sometimes doesn’t feel like it, but public opposition to Trump is working. Protest is how regular folks make change in this country. Outside of elections, and for most ordinary people who are opposed to the assault on our most basic rights, it is the most powerful tool we have.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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