How did your No Kings Day protests shake out?

Do any of you feel like you were able to make any kind of headway at all at any of these protests?

I wasn't able to make it to any protests for various reasons. I went to one maybe a year ago and felt pretty gross there and could barely bring myself to talk with anyone. It was libbed the fuck up. Hundreds of people were there. I haven't had issues talking with smaller groups of lib protesters but a huge active loud crowd with lots of American and Ukraine flags just didn't make me feel comfortable. I'm not a shut-in, by the way, I used to be a teacher, I've spoken to crowds of hundreds of people, I love talking with people either alone or in groups about almost anything, but I wasn't feeling it there.

A family friend actually knocked on our door though, a guy I haven't seen in a few years. I always thought he was nice (actually, his whole family is nice). He had a Bernie pin and was carrying a few pamphlets for establishment Democrats. We talked for maybe ten minutes before he said he was late for the rally and had to leave. I said that the USA has been a fascist genocidal dictatorship since day one, the money extracted from slaves was never given back and is still circulating in the economy (it IS the economy), etc., etc. He was still trying to convince me to vote for the Democrats. I was like, dude, I watched them slaughter my friends in Gaza, I'm not voting for them. He of course asked if I was going to vote for the Republicans. Yes, I just said that I'm not voting for Democrats because of genocide, so of course I'm considering voting for the other genocide party (sarcasm). He only seemed to get visibly angry when I mentioned that Ukraine has been run by Nazis since 2014 and that Zelenskyyyyyy said he wanted Ukraine to be the next Israel. Of course, after he left I thought that I should have told him about how the Democrats stole Bernie's votes right in front of me at the 2020 caucus I attended (as the pandemic was beginning in the USA), an act which finally turned me completely against voting in the USA, but oh well. I did ask him to stop asking people to vote for the Democrats, and he just smiled.

His wife was an elementary school teacher before she retired, and before the pandemic I used to sub and had a rather disturbing conversation with her. (As a sub, you get a really interesting perspective on basically every aspect of a school; only the teachers and administrators treated me in a weird way sometimes, the students were always nice.) I told her that school scores correlate with the necessities that student have at home: kids who are starving, for instance, probably aren't going to be the best students. She said something in response like: "if that's true, then what's the point?" As if the only point of education in our society is just measuring the wealth of your family (which is basically true). Our schools don't educate people. They function as a sorting hat: you get to be either a business owner, an office worker, someone who does manual labor, or a prisoner. That's it!

About a week ago there was a small No Kings-style protest in a town I was driving through. I didn't have time to get out and talk with the protestors—maybe ten or twenty white boomers. As I was driving past them, I asked where they had been when Biden was slaughtering children in Gaza. None of them answered. They just stared at me. So I answered for them: "Nowhere!" I went back about twenty minutes later and they had all left. Was it because of me? I don't know. These protests seemingly only go on for an hour or so.

Some of you might remember that I've had to spend extensive periods of time alone talking about politics with my extremely liberal boss and her extremely liberal son—without getting fired. My boss is a lying, abusive, moody, two-faced lunatic who has nonetheless experienced near-homelessness, so she actually seems more sympathetic to socialism (so far as I can tell) than her son, who is in his early thirties and seems to have a fairly successful creative career in Hollywood. I've probably spent a total of several hours discussing politics with them, without ever saying that I'm a Marxist, and almost always without using Marxist language. (At one point I told the son that his mom is petite bourgeois, which she is!, since he had trouble understanding how she could be exploiting workers when she herself does productive labor.)

My conclusion after spending so much time talking about politics with liberals is that, without a successful revolution and extensive re-education, there is little hope for changing their minds. We all came to Marxism at different points in our lives (some of you were lucky enough to have Marxist relatives who educated you when you were very young), but it's hard for me at this point to look with much sympathy at someone who must have been aware of the Gaza genocide, who nonetheless refused to go deeper on this issue than "it's all Netanyahu's fault." But is saying this no different from reaching the same conclusion about people who weren't radicalized by Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, etc.?

The boss's son is also totally obsessed with voting, but of course not in the workplace. Voting fetishism is also a form of white supremacy. "Western countries are superior to the dark hordes of the third world because we vote while they don't." Obviously I believe in democracy, but not in a country where all media except hexbear (so far as I can tell) is controlled by Nazis, where both political parties are controlled by Nazis, even at the local level. I won elections in the past, I reached the fabled bargaining table, I saw how astoundingly hopeless this approach is. Nothing is going to change here without an armed red guard.