There were multiple "No Kings" rallies in the greater metro area October 18. The one a Johnson County Community College had 8 speakers, organized by Martha Lawrence and Nancy Mays of Boots on the Ground Midwest. A video of this "No Kings Protest @ JCCC" is available on YouTube. Excerpts from those talks were featured in this broadcast, summarized here:
- Jae Moyer, an LGBTQ+ activist, discussed his insistence on "being my authentic self." He said that Donal Trump "cultivates a divisive culture of fear pitting us against one another." He mentioned two specific actions by Trump supporters: (1) The effort by Kansas Republicans to convene a special redistricting session of the Kansas legislature and (2) the Young Republicans praising Hitler.
- Nubia with Dream Alliance was brought to the US at the age of 3. She now holds duel US and Mexican citizenship. She said that this last year "has been no-stop scary, fearful, and a complete nightmare". She spoke of a young father building a construction company in the US from the bottom up, who was pulled over by law enforcement, saying they were looking for someone else, but was detained and deported, leaving his pregnant wife and three children in the US. She said that about 7 percent of those detained have never been incarcerated before. Many panic, sign a deportation order and are deported. "That's how we have broken families here", she said. She mentioned Jeanette Vizguerra, a sanctuary church leader, who has been incarcerated for over 6 months and fighting from within the detention center in Colorado. She said that the administration is especially targeting humans involved in advocacy.
- Mark McCormick, a New York Times best-selling author, said that some 300,000 Black women have lost their jobs this year. "Neo-Nazis and other hate groups are now marching with bold arrogance. We are facing direct attacks on our history, our institutions, and our jobs. There are escalating efforts to dismantle voting rights, block access to fair elections, to erode gains fought for over generations. ... People in masks are snatching other people off the street." He mentioned Wright Thompson (2024) The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi about the 1955 murder in a barn of Emmett Till, a Black teenager. Till was brutally beaten then killed, and his body was dumped in the Tallahatchie River. McCormick mentioned two things that struck him about Thompson's work on this. First, when asked about the reaction to the book, Thompson "said his readers uniformly say that those now on control of our government want to return to a pre-Civil Rights America." Second, he described a conversation with a niece of Mose Wright, Emmett Till's uncle, from whose home Till was take. The niece said she was grateful that Till got out of the river, because it's known as "the singing river", because of so many lynching victims dumped in that river.
- Huascar Medina, a former Kansas poet laureate and second-generation immigrant living in the heartland. He said, "Only fascists have a problem with anti-fascists." And he recited his poem "New American".
- Bryson Ripley, former US Marine, president of the Kansas City chapter of Vets for Peace and a student at Johnson County Community College and the University of Kansas. He discussed the US Army talk orientation fact sheet number 64 on fascism released 1945-03-24, a month after Marines planted a US flag on Iwo Jima. He quoted several lines from that "Army Talk orientation fact sheet". He noted, "the press, radio, movie, stage, all were put to the task of glorifying war. The school system from kindergarten to university justified and exalted tyranny. ... Fascism is built on propaganda." Good people will not vote to hurt others ... unless they are lied to. "The lies of Joseph Goebels are the same lies being said on Fox and OAA." He cited Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler's 1935 book, War is a racket. "How many wars are we going to be lied into?" Ripley asked.
- Laurel Burchfield discussed the Mainstream Coalition and Kansas Fair Maps. She said the Republican leaders in Kansas have approved a half-million dollar budget for a special session of the legislature but have not yet called that session, "because they know we're watching, and we're saying 'No!'"
- Rabbi Moti Rieber, executive director of the Kansas Interfaith Action group. He mentioned a recent story in the Guardian about "the chill girl" -- high school girls who remain silent when they hear boys making racist or sexist jokes, to avoid being "accused of being a killjoy or worse." How much damage are we doing to the girls and the boys who "grow up to be Young Republican operatives"? He said we have an administration "of mediocre white men" with billions of dollars, a compliant Congress and Supreme Court and a complicit media. He said that Ty Masterson and Dan Hawkins are mediocre too. "The damage being done under the MAGA boot heel will take years to undo, but their mediocrity is actually one of our greatest weapons." We are currently in a struggle between two diametrically opposed worldviews: slaveholder Christianity, aka Christian Nationalism, and a vision of a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-racial America. Rabbi Rieber also said that the scriptures insist that we care for the orphan, the widow and the immigrants.1
- Dr. Micah Kubic, executive director of the Kansas ACLU. He said they asked the Johnson County Election Commissioner to start making at least some materials available in a language other than English. The Commissioner replied that it was, "deplorable to even ask." The Kansas ACLU is asking supporters to ask their election commissioner to expand voting access.
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- Genesis 37:1−40:23 discussed "Caring for the Widow, the Stranger, and the Orphan", as summarized on ReformJudiasm.org. Similarly, Matthew 25:35-41 includes, "I was a stranger, and you took me in." Muslims consider the Jewish and Christian scriptures as holy but are not revered as much as the Quran.
Copyright 2025, Martha Lawrence, Nancy Mays, Jae Moyer, Nubia with Dream Alliance, Mark McCormick, Huascar Medina, Bryson Ripley, Laurel Birchfield, Moti Rieber, Micah Kubic, and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license
