Kam and I went to the No Kings protest in San Jos\u00e9 today.<\/p>\r\n
At first it was a little unclear what the structure of the protest was\u2014I didn\u2019t see\/hear anyone speaking to the crowd. But shortly after we arrived, the crowd started moving, and we went along. It turned into a march through the streets, covering a route maybe sixish blocks long that ended back at the park where it started. (There were protest monitors and street barriers set up along the way; it was clear that the route was predetermined, I just hadn\u2019t known what it was.)<\/p>\r\n
I missed an opportunity early on to stand on some high steps and look over the crowd, so I never had a clear sense of how many people there were. Someone on Bluesky estimates 12,000. A news video said two or three hundred, which was so blatantly wrong that I didn\u2019t bother watching the rest of it. (But possibly they were referring to a different protest or a different day.)<\/p>\r\n
It appeared to be enough people to fill the whole street for several blocks, but I\u2019m not certain of that.<\/p>\r\n
Lots of signs, lots of chants. A couple of brown kids wearing lovely brightly colored dresses, doing a dance to music. Some people drumming as we walked, others blowing soap bubbles. Cars honked horns as they drove past. Warm sunlight. Lots of flags, including lots of US flags (a few upside-down, most right-side-up) and some Mexican flags and some rainbow and trans flags (some worn as capes)\u2014it took me a while to remember that it\u2019s Flag Day. The only police I saw were standing at intersections where car traffic was blocked off; they weren\u2019t interacting with the crowd at all. My sense of the crowd\u2019s overall mood was somewhere in the anger-and-determination range, with a tinge of festive celebration (but all of those things may have been just in my head, dunno).<\/p>\r\n
Some signs:<\/p>\r\n