Late on Saturday we heard that nearly 7 million people attended No Kings rallies across the United States. We attended two in Pittsburgh on Saturday, and this is what we saw: several thousand folks holding signs, a dozen person-sized chickens, a walking banana, several upright and puffy frogs, a polar bear followed by a bald eagle (walking not flying), a 6-foot-tall cat, and a waddling dinosaur that nearly lost its footing while stepping off a curb.
Folks, we live in absurd and historic times. Should we be surprised that historically absurd responses are proving most effective?
On Friday, President Donald Trump commuted the sentence of convicted fraudster and disgraced former Republican U.S. Rep. George Santos. How do you respond to this? Santos is a piece of work. He stole from his family, he stole from his constituents, he stole from a GoFundMe campaign set up to raise money to pay for a dog’s surgery. He’s a Scooby-Doo cartoon villain. The ex-congressman’s illegal antics earned him a lengthy prison term, but he said nice things about Trump, so now he’s a free man.
Apparently, law means nothing anymore. George Santos is a joke, but Trump’s other actions are deadly serious. We’re bombarded with a seemingly never-ending series of stories about overstuffed ICE agents determined to display their manhood by, say, shooting a pastor in the head with a pepper ball or pushing women to the ground. Yet these hyped-up dudes seeking to intimidate look ridiculous when facing off against people in giant inflatable reptile suits or naked people on bicycles. Our hats are off to the folks in Portland, Oregon.
PUP sent teams to both of Pittsburgh’s No Kings rallies. Bob Batz Jr. reported that the first, held at Downtown’s City-County Building, looked bigger than the one held in June, which was the biggest protest we’d seen in more than 40 years of covering news in this city. We don’t see crowds like this in Pittsburgh unless Sid is hoisting a Stanley Cup on the boulevard. A second rally followed at Lake Elizabeth in Allegheny Commons Park West on the North Side. We had a hard time estimating the size of this crowd because it was spread out around the lake and into the park. We later heard it was around 3,000 people.
We feel a special connection to protests against an administration that’s constantly saying, “F***k the law, we’re gonna do what we want.” We’ve been frustrated for years by Post-Gazette owners and managers who broke federal labor law and have yet to face consequences. That’s why we walked out on Oct. 18, 2022 — exactly three years from Saturday.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette striker Natalie Duleba stepped up the microphone at Lake Elizabeth around 3 o’clock and told the crowd that the owners of the PG, members of the Block family, are like so many other powerful people who “take the money they have made by exploiting the labor of the working class and turn around to use it to try and crush us and our rights.”
“They use it to manipulate the public, to spread misinformation, to squash dissent and sow fear. They think that because they have money, they can do whatever they want.”
Sound familiar?
“It is up to us to prove them wrong,” Natalie said.
Amen to that.
Several speakers pointed out a simple fact about today’s America: Folks in power care about money above all. Ask any federal worker.
“In the labor movement we have a saying, ‘If you’re not at the table then you’re probably on the menu,’” said labor organizer Guillermo Perez. “Brothers and sisters, siblings, what we have happening right now is a billionaire’s all-you-can-eat special. Brutal cuts to federal programs that largely benefit working people while providing giant tax breaks to the billionaire class.”
The so-called experts on cable news spend a lot of time talking about the progressive left’s current sense of hopelessness and fear. Maybe they’re right. We’re not the experts, but we’ve been on strike for 1,095 days so we know something about battling both hopelessness and fear and about keeping up a fight even when you’re exhausted. As Natalie said, “What I have learned over the past three years is that the people I can count on are the ones who are in it with me.”
U.S. Rep. Summer Lee, D-Swissvale, spoke late in the afternoon — a few hours after speaking the earlier rally — and she addressed the issue of despair head on.
“Don’t get too caught up in the feelings of hopelessness and helplessness because, let me tell you something, Pittsburgh, let me tell you something, America, you are not hopeless and you’re not helpless. You have power in this country. You have a voice in this country. Whether or not you use it is up to you.”
She then connected the current moment, and the sacrifices and work required to fight against Trump’s authoritarian policies, to past struggles.
“How do you move forward when everything feels hard and everything feels like it ain’t gonna come out our way?” she asked. “Well, I’ll tell you that I am a legacy of the descendants of enslaved Africans who have been fighting in this country generation after generation. And if they got tired and if they felt too hopeless to fight back against systems of oppression, then we wouldn’t be where we are today.
“So it’s in our DNA to fight back. It’s in the country’s DNA to reshape and remold it. We are a part of a movement that never ended.”
What is your personal responsibility in this movement? Showing up for a mass protest feels good, but is it enough? What is your responsibility when masked agents are snatching people off the streets? When our country indiscriminately kills, or supports the killings conducted by other countries? When the administration focuses its destructive powers on communities of color, on the poor? Meeting the moment may require actions that prove uncomfortable — organizing with people outside of your community, engaging in difficult conversations, sacrificing some of your time, your resources — and doing so now. The American destruction continues daily.
“We don’t have time for sorrow and tears,” Lee said.
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Bob reported that the crowd packed in front of and around Downtown’s City-County Building “roared like soccer fans after a winning goal” during much of that rally.
There was no vantage point on the ground from which you could see everyone who came, he said. Sign-holding, flag-waving and costume-wearing participants filled Grant Street to the left and the right of the portico where the speakers stood, and also squeezed into the side streets where they couldn’t even hear what was being said.
“I believe when we work together and we respect each other’s humanity, we can defeat Trumpism and build a better world,” said Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato, outlining steps the county has taken to push back, such as starting an Office of Worker Protection.
“Show me what democracy looks like!” speaker Monica Ruiz, the executive director of Casa San Jose, challenged the crowd. She told people to “just don’t stand here. There’s a lot more work to do,” including, as fellow speaker and Pennsylvania Democratic Party Chair Eugene DePasquale emphasized, voting on Nov. 4 to retain Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court judges.
A number of signs at the North Side rally inquired about the Epstein files and asked why Trump and the Republican Party remain intent on keeping them hidden.
Here are some of signs at the Downtown rally:
“No crown for the clown.”
“The only monarch I like is the butterfly.”
“Silence is approval.”
“Free speech, free country.”
“Power to the people.”
“This is a moral moment.”
“Rejecting kings since 1776.”
No Kings rallies happened in other local communities, including Beaver, Greensburg, McCandless, Mt. Lebanon, Sewickley, Uniontown and Washington, Pa. In total, events were held in more than 2,700 communities, according to the national No Kings group. It plans an online call on Oct. 21 to discuss what’s next: https://www.nokings.org.
Steve is a photojournalist and writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he is currently on strike and working as a Union Progress co-editor. Reach him at smellon@unionprogress.com.