No Kings Protest Concord, Massachusetts, October 18, 2025, C_09 By Victor Grigas – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=176953670
Why demonstrate?
There’s lots of reasons to do demonstrations like No Kings, and I’ll touch on a few of them. But the reason I’m really getting into is the one inherent in the word. We are literally demonstrating — showing clearly — what we think and believe.
Humans are social animals. We’re more likely to believe what others around us believe — or more accurately, what we THINK others around us believe. If our friends and neighbors and family believe capitalism sucks and Black lives matter, we’re more likely to believe that. And bigger numbers are more persuasive. Maybe they shouldn’t be, but they are. It’s easy to dismiss a lone anti-capitalist neighbor as a crackpot. It’s harder to dismiss the whole neighborhood.
A demonstration shows — literally demonstrates — what we think. And a massive, millions-large, nationwide and global demonstration like No Kings does this on a massive scale. It’s not going to persuade a hard-liner who’s opposed to us. But if people are on the fence, it can help move the needle. If people already more or less agree, it bolsters that position. It makes our beliefs normal. It moves the Overton window.
There are other reasons for demonstrations. They inspire people to other forms of activism. They’re a place to network and find out about specific other forms of activism. They give people courage to stand up and speak out in other places and times. They give people feelings of community and hope — and if you’re thinking that’s “just feel-good activism,” remember how hard it is to do activism when we feel isolated, despairing, and hopeless.
But I’m more than a little baffled by people who criticize big demonstrations for being “performative.” Of course they are. That’s a huge part of the point. A demonstration like No Kings is a massive performance — a spectacle even — saying “We all think this. We all think Trump and MAGA are vile. We are all scared and distressed by the direction the country is going, and we want it to stop.” And like it or not, that is persuasive.
The vintage ones had an excellent long run, but they were starting to disintegrate. And I fell head over heels in love with these. Thought some of you might like to see them.
This is a guest post, a reprint of an article written by Tony the Democrat of Postcards to Voters, posted to their mailing list on June 4, 2025. And yes, Get Out the Vote campaigns are happening now, including postcard writing, with special elections and primaries happening frequently, and local/state elections happening this fall. Reprinted with permission from Tony, who’s been an atheist since he was in his late teens.
Why Write to Ruby Red Areas?
Yesterday, Postcards to Voters supported candidate Democrat Keenon Walker lost his bid to serve on the Hattiesburg, Mississippi City Council from Ward 3. It was a three-way race and the Republican candidate won with about 65 percent of the vote.
We knew from the first conversations with Keenon that his was going to be a difficult lift. He was doing all the right things on the ground including door-to-door canvassing. His list of voters was short. There was nothing else competing on our election calendar.
So when the results come in that lopsided, it is fair to ask: Why do we keep writing to ruby red areas?
I’ve just started a new hobby — painting boots! I have about twenty thousand pairs of black combat-style stomper boots, and I wanted to start dressing them up and making them more interesting. This is my trial run. I’m pretty happy with it! I have things to learn about the medium, but I really like how they came out and will be happy to wear them.
I just wrote this letter to Target. Cat pic for algos.
My name is Greta Christina, I’m writing to inform you that I’m cancelling my Target membership and will no longer be shopping with your company. I’ve spent about $1000 a year with your company for many years now, but that ends today.
This is a direct result of Target giving in to the Trump administration and scaling back on DEI practices. “DEI” is just another term for “fairness.” Target has essentially said that they are no longer willing to work towards being more fair — simply because they’ve been told to do so by the worst president in US history.
You used to be a decent company, as much as a large corporation can be decent. But you have ruined your legacy. You will now go down in history as one of the companies that, when faced with the decision to cave into pressure or stand up for what’s right, chose to cave in.
If you change your mind and rescind this decision, I’ll consider shopping with you again. But it will be very difficult to ever trust you again. I start my Costco membership next month. Goodbye.
Urwahn E-Bike “Platzhirsch” image by Writtenby, via Wikimedia Commons, under Creative Commons license
We need to talk about ableist gatekeeping in cycling culture
An open letter to SFGATE by Greta Christina
The proposal to ban e-bikes from bike lanes might have been persuasive if it had been an actual argument, rather than an ableist, gatekeeping diatribe about the superiority of old-school cycling. (“We need to talk about San Francisco’s e-bike problem,” Dan Gentile, SFGATE, Feb. 13, 2025.)
E-bikes make cycling accessible to old people, many people with disabilities, and people who simply don’t have the genetics or time needed to become hard-core cyclists. E-bikes are getting a lot more people out of their cars and onto bikes — a goal that’s good for both traffic and the environment. If Dan Gentile wants e-bikers to be more considerate, he could start by understanding the variety of reasons that regular cycling isn’t accessible to everyone. Instead, he chose to show public contempt for people who aren’t as jacked as he is.
Are there rude e-bikers who endanger regular cyclists? Sure. Just like there are rude regular cyclists who endanger pedestrians. (I don’t know how many times I’ve almost been run over by cyclists who think stop signs are a suggestion.) There are lots of possible solutions to that problem, from speed limits for e-bikes in bike lanes to bringing more e-bikers into the cycling community. If those don’t work, then yes, banning e-bikes from bike lanes should be on the table. But traffic policy should be based on carefully-gathered evidence about safety, traffic flow, and the environment — not personal beefs, who has camaraderie and kinship with whom, or a desire to maintain a sense of superiority. Bike lanes are not a prize earned by having thighs of steel.
Greta Christina is a freelance writer and long-time San Francisco resident. She rides a non-electric adult tricycle.
I recently watched the movie It for the first time. I had to watch in ten-minute bursts, it was so disturbing. I loved it, FYI: it’s far more unique and powerful than I’d expected going in, and I’m always a sucker for stories about solidarity and collective action. Watching it — and pausing before I could go back to watching it — I kept thinking about other movies and TV shows it’s in conversation with, stories it was shaped by and stories it’s shaped. Carrie. The Blair Witch Project. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Stranger Things. And I kept thinking, again and again, about The Goonies. It has so much in common with The Goonies, it feels like watching the earlier movie in a funhouse mirror.
But even though It is a supernatural horror movie, and The Goonies is a more-or-less grounded adventure story that almost could have taken place in the real world, It feels more real to me than The Goonies. What’s terrifying about It isn’t Pennywise — it’s childhood. It is an appallingly dead-on depiction of the horrors of being young. Horror isn’t all there is to childhood, of course: it’d be just as reductive to describe youth as universal pure terror as it would be to describe it as pure innocent joy. But — well, let’s talk for a moment about pure, innocent childhood joy. Continue reading “Is “It” a Rebuke to “The Goonies”?”→
I wrote this in 2023; it seems appropriate for a reprint now.
I’ll admit, this is pretty random. I’m doing some deep-dive writing about the Godfather movies, and I’m watching the White House Plumbers show on HBO (hilarious) and reading Watergate: A New History (excellent). My media brain is steeping in these worlds, and of course it’s finding shit to compare and contrast. It’s what my brain does.
So. Let’s compare and contrast. Michael Corleone and Richard Nixon. Like a freshman English paper.
Richard Nixon had a seriously brilliant mind. He had real skills with people, despite his obvious discomfort with them. He had powerful political abilities, with an extraordinary ability to bounce back from defeat. He inspired great loyalty in people who worked for him. And he had something vaguely resembling a genuine interest in public service. The EPA, Title IX, detente with Russia, diplomatic relations with China — that all happened under Nixon.
And he was a total shitbag of a human being. He saw political opponents as enemies, and he saw enemies everywhere. He equated his own selfish interests with the interests of the country, treating threats against himself as threats against the nation. He rationalized his most heinous acts by convincing himself that his enemies were all doing it, too.* He pursued a vile and pointless war, a war he knew was unwinnable, because he didn’t want to be a loser.** And let’s not forget: obstruction of justice, abuse of power, bribery (giving and receiving), tax fraud, election tampering, innumerable violations of his oath of office. His ethics, his concerns about the law and the Constitution, varied from corrupt to nonexistent.
He’s a tragic figure. But it’s the tragedy of wasted potential. I don’t feel sorry for him, except to the degree that I feel sorry for anyone in pain. His tragedy is that he used his power to inflict massive damage, on the people near him and the world at large.
Content note: passing, non-detailed references to sex creeps, sexual assault, anti-trans hostility, and other oppressive behavior.
When is it okay to appreciate art made by terrible people?
I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I’m thinking about it again right now because of Neil Gaiman, although I could have written this at almost any time: there’s way too much wonderful art created by vile people. A lot of people are thinking about this now, and have been for a long time. Part of why the “cancel culture” debates are so difficult is that there’s no simple, clear answer that applies in all cases — and bad-faith trolls use that fact to ridicule the whole project.
But that’s silly. It’s silly to dismiss a problem just because it’s complicated. And if our responses to a problem require nuance, that doesn’t give us license to ignore it.
I swear, I didn’t go into Megalopolis with a poisoned pen. I love Coppola’s work — a lot of it, anyway — and I’ve been looking forward to Megalopolis since I heard about it. Coppola doing grand-vision science fiction in the vein of Metropolis? Sure! I was all in. I knew this movie would probably be Coppola’s swan song, and I wanted it to be worthy of his skill and experience and vision. I went into the theater with cautious optimism, sincerely hoping to like it, even expecting to like it.
Holy cats, this movie is bad.
It’s almost not even a movie. It’s like twelve movies crammed into one. It’s like Coppola took every grandiose political and philosophical idea he has, added in three times more characters than he needed, tossed it all in a blender, and threw the resulting soup onto the screen. It might have worked as a limited mini-series, if he’d had twelve hours to flesh out the characters and do some goddamn world-building. As it is, the characters are caricatures, tropes rather than people. The story somehow manages to be both heavy-handed and confusing. The pacing is both hasty and tedious, like a bullet train that keeps running into peat bogs. And the dialogue — well, my more generous interpretation of the dialogue is that it sounds like a first draft. My less generous interpretation is that it sounds like it was written by a sophomore film major, with supposedly Big Ideas shoved into the mouths of characters in the most cringy way imaginable.
I love Coppola’s grandness. But what I love is the details within that grandness: the flicker of an expression on a character’s face, a small gesture marking a big decision quietly made, the human-scaled lives lived in the big, expansive worlds. The look of Megalopolis is about as far from human as you could get. I don’t object to movies that are highly stylized and heavily symbolic, and the visuals in Megalopolis are often stunning, beautiful and wildly imaginative. But I want stylization to have coherence. I want symbols to be more than just clumsy representations of half-baked ideas. I want beauty and grandeur to do something other than just look cool.
And the purported science underlying the story — look. I’m fine not understanding the science in science fiction. I don’t need it to make sense. But I want to feel like it makes sense to the creator. It’s like a skyscraper or an airplane: I don’t need to understand the details of the engineering, I just need to trust that those details are understood by the people who made the thing. And I don’t feel that here. The heart of Megalopolis is a major, world-changing scientific discovery/invention, centering all the main characters and driving the plot — and I have absolutely no idea what it is. Adam Driver changes physics with his brain, I think? It’s “something something time,” “something something magical morphing material that will [mumble] fix all social problems,” “love and connection and dimensions and stuff,” “string theory maybe?”
I haven’t even touched on the actual political-philosophical content. It’s somehow both ham-fisted and muddy, so it’s a little hard to analyze. But can we please stop making stories about social change where the fulcrum is One Great Man? Can we stop making stories where social progress hinges on a Misunderstood Genius getting his way? Can we please, please, stop using sexual liberty as a code for moral and social decay, using sexually transgressive imagery to titillate the audience while morally judging the transgressors? That one’s not just insulting and inaccurate. It’s so fucking lazy and boring, it makes me want to crawl out of my skin.
And can we fucking well NOT make the trans-adjacent, gender-queer character into a fascist demagogue literally standing on a swastika? That’s not just insulting. It’s grotesque. Trans and gender-queer people are the fucking goddamn targets of fascist demagoguery, the ones whose bodies are in the crosshairs. It’s bad enough to write a villain who’s half-assedly conceived of as maybe-trans, maybe-gender-queer, maybe-crossdressing, maybe just an all-purpose sexual and gender libertine, with their gender-whateverness being written as a sign of their villainy. It is so much worse to write an obvious stand-in for MAGA fascism and Naziism — and put a gender-queer character in that uniform. Fuck you for that, Coppola. It’s vile.
I keep thinking about Coppola’s The Godfather Coda, also known in its pre-re-edited incarnation as The Godfather Part 3. My take on the third Godfather movie is that there’s a brilliant movie in there, struggling to get out of the muck, and its greatest disappointment is that we never got to see it.
But I don’t think that’s true with Megalopolis. There isn’t a great movie inside Megalopolis. There’s the concept of a great movie. There was clearly the desire to make a great movie. Thirty years from now on the midnight movie circuit, we might find some awkward, cringy greatness in the movie. But today, in 2024, it’s just cringe.
