There was a lot going on the 28th. To tell at least a little bit more of the story, here we have assembled three perspectives of the third No Kings march that took place in downtown Phoenix at (scratch that, near) the state capitol. Enjoy.
Arms of The Saguaro || Disclaimer: One of the included authors has been labelled a vague “Security Risk” by some of the 50501 Organizers (over a bluesky post). Please, judge us by our enemies.
Part One: Tabling
I spent my walk to go set up the table shouting “anything you don’t take we have to carry”. People loitering outside the police station and countless protesters helped by grabbing one or two bottles of water from me at a time. Only half of them even made it to the table. One old fellow took two bottles from me and struck up a conversation about language of all things.
A King, in the english speaking world, would never be referred to singularly. Other languages handle this differently, but the British monarch would elevate himself to plurality. “I” would become the famous royal “we”.
During the founding of the United States; slaver, writer, and future president Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence grew fond of playing with this linguistic quirk. The end of his declaration uses the term repeatedly for emphasis, but also as a juxtaposition against the language used in royal decrees. Jefferson’s “we” was of the congress, and George’s was only of himself.
No Kings has established its events already, firmly, as non-protests. Parades, rallies, or surveillance state shooting galleries maybe but it could not be farther from a disruptive act. What good does it do for us anarchists, antifascists, and abolitionists to be spending an afternoon canvassing? By co-opting these movements and disrupting their stifling mechanisms, local bands of anarchists have the opportunity to expand the “we” on the table and turn parades into broadcasts.
While the organizers of democrat rallies lean on a Jeffersonian concept of “we” as an organized and bureaucratic element driving a wider set of “the people”, anarchists today champion solidarity of a sort that was not rhetorically available or fathomable to the eighteenth century bourgeoisie. What we are rebelling against today is no longer a king dropping the royal “we”, but a vast and powerful bureaucracy of that early Liberal ideal. Our transition will have to be as, if not more revolutionary.
Back at the table, our rabble-rousing commenced. A few police officers dispersed among the crowd moving cones and mingling with organizers were heckled by the table in bloc. As a cop passed our table and got told where to go and what to do once he got there, a man with his bicycle stopped to talk to me. He called himself OG, and he told me how he figured that Police had to protect people at large due to the existence of flat-fisted, self described dangerous motherfuckers as himself. When that argument is being made by a 250 lb man twelve inches from your face, anarchist principles aside, it can be quite convincing.
I asked what that protection had to look like, and if done right it would look anything like our police. He, like most, didn’t know the rate at which they kill people over the course of their “protection” but he confided to me about the ways in which their violence impacted his life. While many people out on the streets can have their ignorance written off, we have to contend with the reality that even the prisoners are often convinced of the alleged good of the system, and while OG spent his life confronting that very directly, most of us are prisoners in a more insidious and invisible sense of the term. I was protected in spite of the police because I was there amongst comrades. Until these people have that for themselves, the path of least resistance will see them using city cops as a crutch.
Part Two: Gathering
Another call for a No Kings protest made the rounds in Phoenix for March 28th, along with calls from crimethinc and other cool kids for anarchists to participate in their own way. Given that at the last Phoenix No Kings parade liberal organizers (highly outnumbering anarchists) felt gutsy enough to bully them out of the limelight, there was a renewed effort to take it back from them. Organized out of public view, local anti fascists resolved to intervene in the usual stale affair and push our own politics and rhetoric. The plan was to take the front of the march and keep it, unlike before. Two large banners were made showing solidarity with the Prairieland 9, the canaries in the coal mine for the Trump administration’s war on antifascist dissent. Being the case that will set a precedent for years to come, we wanted their story to be front and center.
The gathering began in downtown under the Phoenix sun and the shadows of the bank and corporate owned towers. A few of us set up a table with zines, stickers and water for the masses. We met some of our other peeps and talked with some interested passerby. Once or twice we were heckled by some yuppie liberals. Then, a few of us walked around and assessed the logistics of the march. We knew the organizers had specific plans for their parade, with an order of who was to be in the front, who would lead chants etc.
Their precious photo op of the front of the marching crowd was what we planned to take for ourselves. As we were dressed in black attire, it was obvious to onlookers that we were “the antifas” hovering close to the starting point, but our banners were still hidden at this point. A person in an orange vest approached us and asked if we would hang back and protect the women dressed in red like in that show all the liberals like. She stated that the brass band (jealous tbh) was to lead the way, and something along the lines of “we want to stay together, we could use you guys back here!” as if we were dumb muscle for them. Not wanting to be rude or reveal our intentions, one of us responded with “We will definitely walk in the same direction!”
We waited for the perfect moment, just when the band began to play and the mass of folks began to walk, to unfurl our banners and take up as much space as we could across the front. To our pleasant surprise, no one opposed us past this point. For the entirety of the parade, two banners proclaiming solidarity with the Prairieland defendants and all antifascists flew proudly at the expense of the usual squad of dumbass orgs, DSA, PSL, 50501 and the like
As we began to chant and establish ourselves front and center, several folks gathered around us and added their energy. We chanted our own chants, and made fun of the lukewarm rhetoric coming out of the organizers megaphone. “No justice, no peace, no racist police” became “no justice no peace, fuck ice, fuck the police!” Someone with a megaphone of their own eventually joined us. A few younger folks helped take up the banner when some of us grew weary. A homie with a Palestinian flag lead us in chants not only saying free Palestine, but fuck Israel and fuck Zionism as well. Another event of note was a young lad with an “America First” baseball cap ran out in front of our banner to pose for a picture. He was swiftly confronted with a lil boop on the head much to his horrifying displeasure.
Overall, this was a decent turnout and exercise in intervention for the Phoenix anarchists. Our city is large, spread out, and quite difficult to navigate logistically. Our police are known for being not only brutal to political dissidents, but also friendly with controlled opposition. The author feels this has made the real ones in Phoenix and its surrounding areas a bit fearful and timid when it comes to things like this. This in turn may give rise to an attitude of “it’s a liberal protest, why bother?” which is not necessarily incorrect. Was this intervention a direct action? Was it the front lines of the antifascist struggle? No, of course not. Those terms have been misused too often by local try hard posers to the point that they have almost lost their meaning entirely.
But if this past weekend showed us anything, it is that it’s really not hard and can be quite fun to inject a liberal parade with real talk, real shit, real anarchist-ness. A little bit of planning, discipline, and guts go a long way. It was because we were bold enough to take territory we did, with the few numbers we had, that the libs knew that trying to take it back would be futile, especially given the relative low stakes of the event itself. What we as anarchists in Phoenix need to take away from this, is that we are capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit for. The logistics and built in repression of the city are daunting, but not unstoppable. Not everything we do has to be a high stakes action or a boring meeting of some dorky book club or org. We have muscles that we can flex that have not been properly flexed in Phoenix since 2020, and in some cases since the late 2000s and early 2010s. Now, when the rise of fascist authoritarian rule is plain to see, it is time we learn to flex those muscles again.
Part Three: Parading
I had arrived with my friends shortly after the day’s events kicked off, and we set up our table in a shaded spot with the others. the anticipation of the march was building up inside me behind while I stood behind our table speaking to all manner of liberals and other malcontents. The homies all gathered their things and we headed off to a spot slightly down the road from where the large crowd was gathering, preparing to march under their banners and in their costumes. We all stood there, sweating in our bloc, waiting for the march to set out.
While a speaker hyped the crowd in the background, a woman approached us and asked us to act as security for a contingent of liberal white women in handmaids tale costumes so that the brass band could take the lead. We declined their offer to use us for their own means and decided to stick with the original plan. as the march set out with a cheer, we quickly unfurled the banners and revealed ourselves to the cameras and to our fellow marchers. we spread out, and occupied the entire front of the march with no resistance.
In fact, we quickly attracted the attention and camaraderie of several of our fellow marchers who, having seen our boldness and action, decided that they wanted to join us at the front. We continued our slow pace up the street. The parade was somewhat subdued by the inability of those wielding the megaphone to get a good rhythmic chant going. A small brass and percussion section alternately stopped and started up music, never quite in sync with the calls and replies coming from the megaphone.
A few of us decided to mock their chants by ad-libbing some of our own, more inflammatory slogans. We noted as we marched towards the capitol that despite claims that this was the highest attendance a no kings event received that there were far fewer people cheering us alongside the road than previous times. We marched right on by the capitol building and back down to Washington and 4th ave where we were heartily greeted by the crowd and the march dispersed.
Overall it was clear from the beginning that we should not consider these events to be a protest of any kind, but rather a social event for disaffected liberals, and an opportunity to spread propaganda. while the banners looked great and it was good fun to ruin a liberal photo op, the real work that day was done by the folks manning the table, and having those important conversations.
Part Four: Tabling (Reprise)
Before the march, a pair of us ran up to the Phoenix Police contingent behind the stage and shouted “Death to America”, just for a reaction. People allow themselves to get stuck in such narrow worldviews that they take the existence of empires for granted, and take the wish for their destruction personally. There is a reason a hundred people must’ve turned down our offer of matches as they walked by with their flags.
A blaze orange vest wearing a surplus boonie cap walked up to our table, and before he could piss off someone less diplomatic I made sure to engage with him. While he was masked up unlike most attendees, he was in the uniform of the Peace Police for these events.
He pled with us to not cause a disturbance or use any violent rhetoric towards the police contingent, insisting their presence was to safeguard our constitutional rights. While he claimed he was sympathetic to anarchists, we could jar or disturb people with an aggressive tone. He did not consider there to be any utility in jarring or disturbing people by pointing out to them uncomfortable truths.
He name-dropped an ugly man with a hairline which is receding from the wrong direction, Sgt. Hugo Lopez, who works for the Community Response Bureau. As someone who has been around protests in the city for years, this was laughable. That squad inside the department has always been responsible for neutering protests; steering them away from their targets, putting up and alleviating arbitrary bureaucratic hurdles in the planning phase with cooperative organizers, and stifling the purpose of protest which is to make a statement the public cannot ignore.
So I asked him, “does us yelling at police cause you problems?” and he said yes. The only thing I had to say was “that sucks for you”.
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