This first installment of a fable contains truth but not the whole truth about how a revolution (call it a counter-revolution if you insist, but it really was about ringing in the new) erupted on April 5th, 2025 in the streets of Washington DC and elsewhere. Along with factual accounts, it incorporates fictional stories about political resistance. As it was written before April 5th, parts could be proved wrong, but these are details. The strenuous reactions we see to Trump’s regime will not be silenced and will only become better organized and coordinated.
Should you care, scroll way down to find events scheduled for April 5th you can join.
The people who thrilled at seeing a group of deer prance across a snowfield didn’t expect to be engulfed by the avalanche the deer triggered. When it hit, they had only the deer and their own obliviousness to the peril to blame. Substitute the Democratic and Republican parties for those people and a pissed-off populace for the deer and you have an apt metaphor for what came to pass.
At first, Joe Bob Briggs, a B-movie critic from Nacogdoches, Texas couldn’t believe what was happening. “All these angry people swarmin’ around our congress critter made him stagger off without givin’ any answers about what the [redacted] the gummint was doin. That ain’t right,” he added. “I voted for that goober ’cause I thought he would stick up fer folks like me. And now he’s gone AWOL. Well screw him.”
Sharlene Goodenough, a physical therapist in Ann Arbor, Michigan claimed to understand the significance of this political moment. “The more they suppress wokeness, the more awake we are. Politics is failing us and we need a new party that represents us, not vested interests, but where to turn?”
Some turned to cheer Bernie Sanders on his “Oligarchy Tour” of Western states in March, co-headlined by AOC. In Denver, over 35,000 showed up, three times the population of my town. Among them, undoubtedly, were quite a few veterans, rightly upset about gutting the VA. Some of these vets might have been Trumpers or even Proud Boys, but that was then. Now they are hopping mad at their good old boy and his muskrat for unraveling their lifelines. Recall that vets tend to have guns and are trained to use them.
When red-staters wrote to their callow reps with their grievances, they received canned, anodyne replies, if any. So after they tried calling and nobody picked up they went online to see who else was hurting and what they were doing about it.
What they found were people organizing protests, promoting boycotts, signing petitions, recapping bad news, propagating memes, and simply bitching. They watched videos of asshole politicians being grilled in Congress and at rowdy town halls and burning Teslas, listened to podcasts, and read newsletters to keep abreast of the ongoing coup, learning a lot more than they did from TV news. And heartened by examples of organizing, some set out to do some of their own.
It didn’t require a degree in Economics to understand that gutting the VA, Social Security and Medicare, among other agencies, was just a prelude to auctioning them off to private wealth syndicates, such as the Secretary of the Treasury may designate. The Secretary had the balls to claim that anyone who called in to complain their SS check hadn’t come was probably a “fraudster.” You can imagine how that went down with seniors.
Some might lay the “inciting incident” (what fiction and script writers call the first turning point in a story) to Bernie’s barnstorming, though others believe it was, like when police killed George Floyd, an otherwise obscure and not so unusual incident that brought people to the streets. Whatever triggered them, protests kept erupting. Major news outlets covered the more violent ones, but soon returned to reporting on the stock market, prices for eggs, and natural, not political, disasters.
One inciting incident seems to have come in early May back in Nacogdoches Texas, at the Social Security Administration’s office slated for closure that day. The two moving trucks that pulled up there were confronted by several hundred senior citizens, some armed, two padlocked to the front door. Blocked from entry, the trucks’ crew called police. After surveying the situation, the cops told the movers they had no jurisdiction and suggested they leave, which they did to cheers and jeers.
The next day the movers were back, accompanied by half a dozen U.S. Marshals, but so were the protestors. That led to an FBI SWAT team being called in to clear the premises. Twelve people were injured, four were hospitalized, and one man who lost his grip on his walker suffered a fatal concussion. Because it involved a member of Congress, the media played it up. Trump blamed the resultant national outcry on the liberal media and told the FCC to revoke broadcast licenses, creating yet another lawsuit for him too face.
Things got uglier a several weeks later when a veteran in a wheelchair shot and killed his Republican congressional rep at a town hall with a pistol concealed in his breathing apparatus. Sitting in jail, Elmer “Mack” MacKinnon, instantly became a folk hero. It was like when Luigi Mangioni stalked and assassinated Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthCare, for causing misery and death by arbitrarily rejecting insurance claims. Public reaction was swift, mostly sympathetic, and far-reaching, and health insurance stocks tumbled for weeks.
Off course, rather than looking into what displeasure caused Mack to go postal, Congress rallied around the memory of its departed member, causing its polls to fall to an all-time low. Some GOP members prayed that Trump would declare their constituents insurrectionists.
Bernie and Mac’s sparks struck combustible material that smoldered for a time online and offline, erupting into a conflagration on April 5th in marches and allies across the country. The one on Washington, DC, said to be 1.2 million people, overwhelmed the city of 700,000. Trump federalized the local national guards, who fanned out across the city following their military advisors.
Nobody knows what sparked the altercation that led to a police riot in Lafayette Square. Rumor was it was started by one or more provocateurs. Word spread that the Feds had detained about 100 protestors there, sparking anger and curiosity. Groups of demonstrators filtered away from other places to form a steady stream and then a stampede to Lafayette Square and the White House.
What happened next may have altered the course of history, but that’s for next time.
To sum up our situation in cinematic terms (Thanks Kamimagic):
TAKE ACTION
More than 900 protest events across the US are scheduled for April 5, 2025. Click the poster or the map to find one near you.
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Now is not the time for despair! America is aroused. And France has your back! Click to play on BlueSky.
Ugly cry… 🫶
— Kristin Reid (@kristinmreid.bsky.social) March 21, 2025 at 5:36 PM
Merci beaucoup France, and courage, comrades.
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