"No Kings" -- just commissars?

I report from a rally up North.

So I attended the “No Kings” rally in Boston earlier today. It looked more like a repurposed Pride rally than an anti-Trump rally, really, and that’s because it was: Boston’s Pride parade got repurposed into the “No Kings but Drag Kings” parade. This was smart in terms of boosting the crowd size — there were a lot more people present than attended the rather pallid anti-Elon protest I attended in Boston a few months ago, which drew numbers in the dozens. This event definitely drew thousands.

But while there was plenty of anti-Trump stuff, I’m not sure there was any more than a regular Pride parade would have featured. There did seem to be more commie stuff than usual, though, so that’s something. Some pictures that I took follow:

One of the smart things about the co-branding with Pride is that corporate outfits would show up who would have skipped a purely anti-Trump event, like this local media truck.

Or this from the Massachusetts DOT:

Or this from the nonprofit Dana Farber Cancer Research Institute:

These people would have shown regardless, I’m sure:

I’m not sure about this guy. He probably chose his outfit with Pride in mind, but maybe these are his everyday gear:

And this guy:

Plenty of commie signage around:

(Amusingly, a class war is basically what Trump is bringing, and these people don’t actually like it one bit.)

The crowd was — as they used to say about Tea Party rallies — overwhelmingly white. There were a few black people here and there, but not very many overall. It was generally a festive atmosphere, and some of the signs were nasty (“Fuck 47,” etc.) but not as much so as you’d expect.

I didn’t see a lot of American flags in the crowd, despite efforts to make them prominent at some other rallies. I don’t think I saw any that weren’t upside down, but I saw quite a few Mexican flags. The First Baptist Church of Boston had a lot of flags on display a few blocks away, but I don’t think they had anything to do with this protest.

I’m told by locals I trust that the turnout this time was a lot heavier than for last year’s Pride parade, which was reportedly dominated by straight white teenage girls from the suburbs.

Make of it what you will. I report, you decide.

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