Category: Columnists

In 1983, I finished college and joined the Peace Corps. I was sent to Nepal, where I taught English in a remote village. To get there, you took an overnight bus out of Kathmandu and then walked for three days into the Himalayan foothills.

My Peace Corps journey changed my life. It opened my eyes to cultural differences, and it taught me how to communicate across them. That’s been an invaluable tool for me, as an educator and a human being.

But when I got to graduate school, I discovered that many of my fellow left-leaning students — and some of their professors — had a decidedly less rosy view of the Peace Corps. It was a neocolonial project, they said, designed to enhance America’s global power and to keep poorer countries in perpetual dependency.

I’ve been thinking about their comments over the past few days, as news spread that U.S. Rep. Scott Perry (R., Pa.) had proposed to eliminate funding for the Peace Corps under amendments he submitted to a House appropriations bill. The York congressman was also an ardent supporter of Elon Musk’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Perry called a “piggy bank for far-left causes.”

Yet, the Peace Corps — like USAID — has also been the target of left-wing attacks, which bear a strong echo to Republican ones. Neither side believes Americans can be a force for good in the world.

That’s why the Peace Corps matters. It’s based on the simple proposition that bringing different people together can help them thrive. And it’s a standing rebuke to cynics on the right and the left.

Going back to Richard Nixon, GOP politicians have tried to diminish — or destroy — the Peace Corps. Their last effort to zero it out took place in 2019, when U.S. Rep. Mark Walker (R., N.C.) proposed to “put America first” by defunding the Peace Corps and devoting the saved dollars to disaster relief at home.

Never mind that the Peace Corps represents 1% of our foreign aid budget, which is usually about 1% of total government spending. That means one out of every 10,000 federal dollars goes to the Peace Corps.

But that’s too much for Perry, who has also proposed eliminating government funding for the Millennium Challenge Corp., which finances infrastructure and anti-poverty programs in poor countries, and for the Democracy Fund, which aids nascent democracies that are under strain.

America’s own democracy is under strain, of course, thanks to the likes of Perry. As his text messages showed, he tried to assist Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He’s also facing a tough reelection battle this fall against Democratic challenger Janelle Stelson, whom he narrowly defeated in 2024.

Perry is betting that his campaign to defund the Peace Corps and other foreign aid will help him at the polls, and I hope he’s wrong. But I also think it’s wrong to dismiss the Peace Corps as an imperial power grab, as my grad student colleagues did.

That critique has been revived in the digital age by “No White Saviors,” a social media campaign begun in 2018. When the Peace Corps evacuated all of its volunteers during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, No White Saviors said they should stay home.

“No more pretending inexperienced young people are actually useful in countries and cultures they are alien to,” No White Saviors declared. “No more spending money on flights or evacuations, no need to teach language or culture.”

That demand was taken up within the Peace Corps itself. Calling themselves “Decolonizing Peace Corps,” disillusioned volunteers called for the abolition of the agency. The Peace Corps was a scam, they said, spending scarce resources that could be better used at home.

Scott Perry and Mark Walker couldn’t have put it better themselves. Whatever their other differences, America First Republicans and No White Saviors think the Peace Corps is a waste of taxpayer dollars.

Please. The 250,000 people who have served in the agency have generated enormous goodwill overseas and huge benefits at home. More than 80% of them continue to volunteer in their communities. A quarter of them have started businesses.

They’re also more diverse than No White Saviors assumes. In 1990, four years after I returned from Nepal, only 7% of volunteers were nonwhite; in 2020, 34% were.

I didn’t go to Nepal to save anyone. I went to live, and to learn, and to grow. And 25 years later, I returned to my village with my 17-year-old daughter. A bus road had been cut into the hills, so the three-day walk was narrowed to about six hours.

The school where I taught held an impromptu “welcome home” ceremony for us. I stood up to give a speech in my broken Nepali, but broke down in tears, overwhelmed by my good fortune to have known these good people. If we jettison the Peace Corps, fewer Americans will experience that kind of connection. I just don’t see how that can be good for America or for the world.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Schooling Citizens: How Education Can Save Democracy,” which will be published next spring by the American Philosophical Society Press.

Immigration is complicated. That makes polling on the topic difficult, as the same Americans who will tell you they support mass deportation one day will turn around and say they back a path to citizenship the next. So, which is it? Well, it depends.

As crowded scenes of immigrants clustering at the southern border were endlessly repeated on TV, many Americans felt the Biden administration was not taking national security seriously and had flung open the golden door to anyone with a pulse and a sob story.

Then, as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents descended on Minneapolis, masked, heavily armed, and dangerously encouraged to ignore people’s constitutional rights — ultimately killing two U.S. citizens because they dared to question authority — even many Donald Trump supporters rose up to say this is not what they voted for.

Unsurprisingly, most Americans fall somewhere in the middle — where balancing immigration control with humanitarian values looks at what makes the most sense for the country and for the people who are looking for a better life here.

But that’s illegal immigration. On legal immigration, most Americans are all in, with only one in five opposing it. Why, then, is the Trump administration hell-bent on making life miserable for legal immigrants?

Earlier this month, a court ruled against an administration decision that froze processing of immigration benefits like work permits and green-card applications for nationals of 39 countries targeted by a travel ban. These are people already in the United States legally who found themselves in limbo for months — many losing their jobs and risking deportation — after U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services determined in January it would keep the $1 billion in fees these immigrants paid and give them nothing in return.

Meanwhile, renewals under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program for immigrants brought here as children have been hit with delays, and approvals of legal permanent residency applications, known as green cards, have fallen by around 16% — all part of the administration’s strategy of bureaucratic sabotage in the guise of “enhanced security.”

The administration has also banned permanent legal residents from qualifying for government-backed small-business loans, while some immigrants, including DACA recipients, can no longer hold commercial driver’s licenses, regardless of possessing a legal work permit.

Two U.S. Supreme Court decisions released last week will only continue to embolden the administration’s anti-legal immigrant push.

On Tuesday, the court’s conservative justices affirmed that border officers do not need “clear and convincing evidence” that a green-card holder seeking to reenter the U.S. has committed a crime to deny them entry. While I hope that one day the Clarence Thomas “border vibe check” joins the “Kavanaugh stop” in the annals of legal ignominy surrounding immigration enforcement, the court’s 6-3 decision makes a mockery of the idea that someone is innocent until proven guilty.

Perhaps even more immediately concerning is the high court’s ruling Thursday allowing the president to end Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians.

The TPS program, a bipartisan congressional creation under President George H.W. Bush, gives immigrants work permits and protection from deportation if they come from countries determined to be too dangerous to go back to. While the word temporary is right there in the name, some program participants have been in the country for decades and have built lives here. For others, the nations they fled are still unsafe to return to, including Haiti, which is in the grip of gang violence and widespread hunger.

That the conservative justices also found that Trump’s comments against Haitians were not “overtly racial” is absurd. Trump infamously referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries” in the same 2018 meeting in which he wondered aloud why America couldn’t have more immigrants from places like Norway. For context, this is the same administration that considers white South Africans the only persecuted minority worthy of asylum in the U.S.

For the moment, the court’s decision applies only to Haitian and Syrian immigrants with TPS, but it has opened the door for the president to do what he has wanted to do since his first term, which is to end the program wholesale. That would impact the 1.3 million TPS holders from around 17 nations and their families, many of whom are U.S. citizens.

While the human impact on communities of this mass de-legalization effort is immeasurable, the economic damage of Trump’s anti-immigrant policies is not.

The 500,000 or so DACA recipients, for example, contribute nearly $17 billion to the U.S. economy annually, also paying into federal social safety net programs they are not legally able to access themselves, according to the immigration rights group FWD.us. TPS recipients contribute about $29 billion a year to the economy and pay $7.8 billion in combined federal, payroll, state, and local taxes.

An immigration policy calculator produced by the Manhattan Institute finds that the kind of policies favored by the administration would add $618 billion to the national debt over 10 years, and leave every American poorer.

Reasonable people can disagree on immigration, but at the very least, Trump’s exclusionary ideas are an economic dead end.

A few months back, the Donald Trump-fried chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, urged broadcasters to air patriotic programming for America’s 250th birthday — including regular on-air recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance.

I couldn’t find any reports about TV or radio stations that have actually done this. Maybe they’ve figured out that the bit at the end — that stuff about “liberty and justice for all” — has been rendered into utter baloney by Carr’s strongman boss.

For anyone who still believes the myth that the United States’ criminal justice system is the envy of the world, I say: Let them come to Fort Worth. In northern Texas, a crime committed by one man with the “wrong” politics gave the Trump regime the ammunition it craved for a free-speech crackdown that makes a mockery of America’s birthday bash.

Ironically, it was on July 4, 2025, that a crew from the small but tight-knit left-wing community in the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) metroplex ventured 30 minutes south to the Prairieland Detention Center run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to protest the squalid conditions and overcrowding there.

The protesters dressed in black; some brought fireworks or medical supplies. The evidence shows they committed some minor crimes — vandalizing a vehicle, for example. But when local police were called, one man — Benjamin Song, an ex-Marine known to local activists as “Champagne” — committed a serious offense, firing a gunshot that wounded a town police officer in the neck. The officer later acknowledged he was pointing his gun at a fleeing protester when Song fired his weapon.

The Prairieland incident came right as the Trump regime was striving to brand “antifa” — a loose ideology that fascism should be resisted by any means necessary — as some kind of highly organized terrorist cell. FBI agents fanned out across DFW, ultimately building a riot-and-terrorism case against nearly two dozen leftists, including the group — now known as the Prairieland 9 — that stood trial this winter at the Fort Worth federal courthouse.

Among the evidence prosecutors presented to bolster their contention that the protesters were part of some kind of terror cell included their black garb, their Signal chats in which they discussed plans for a “noise protest” at Prairieland, or their decision to bring medical supplies with them to the demonstration, which occurred at a time when anti-ICE protests were meeting violent responses. One of the alleged coconspirators wasn’t even at the protest; he’d moved a box of anti-fascist magazines before agents visited his home after his wife called from jail.

Tamera Hutcherson, a local activist who attended much of the trial as a paralegal for defendant Savanna Batten, told me by phone Saturday that the case against Batten “was based on the fact that she showed up to the protest wearing black, she had medical supplies on her, which included a tourniquet, and that she was there for a noise demonstration to set off fireworks.”

Batten, Song, and the other seven were convicted in March, and their sentencing was decided by the trial judge — Mark Pittman, a Trump appointee — and his colleague, Reed O’Connor, a federal jurist so well known for his right-wing rulings that the Trump regime and allies like trillionaire Elon Musk look for excuses to bring cases before him.

In this case, O’Connor was happy to say the quiet part out loud: that a repressive government is seizing on this case to send a message to anyone who wants to aggressively protest mass deportation or other abuses. He called the protest “an assault on democracy,” adding, “The need to deter this type of conduct is high.”

Still, courtroom observers were stunned when the sentences came down. It wasn’t a total shock when Song, convicted of attempted murder, was given 100 years, but Batten, the black-clad medic, got 50 years — a virtual life sentence for dissent — as did several others. Daniel Sanchez Estrada, the magazine mover, got 30 years.

Hutcherson, who was in the courtroom for last week’s sentencing, called O’Connor’s comments “chilling … to have the judge say this out loud, it really sunk in.”

What’s sunk in is that the federal government is pouncing on the Prairieland 9 convictions to unleash a crackdown on left-wing protest that will make America’s past sins like the Palmer raids, McCarthyism, and the trial of the Chicago 7 look like child’s play.

In recent days, we’ve seen federal charges against the Minneapolis 15 protesters who monitored the Minnesota ICE raids in Signal chats, and an indictment against two Atlanta protesters against the “Cop City” police training center — even after a local judge had essentially laughed state charges against them out of his court. When a state prosecutor offered evidence of criminality that the Cop City demonstrators wore black clothes and masks, Judge Robert Flournoy said, “Oh, that sounds like ICE.”

There’s a lot going on here. The Trump regime — which last fall designated “antifa” (again, not an actual group) as a terrorist organization, abusing its vast post-9/11 powers as many of us feared it would — is aggressively clamping down on the First Amendment-protected right of dissent ahead of the November midterms, when its dictatorial-minded leader will stop at nothing to keep his party in power.

But these 50-year prison sentences, which carry the sauerkraut stench of German cooking, circa 1933, are also an exclamation point on the death of even pretending there is anything resembling impartial criminal justice in America. We are now a land where left-wing dissenters will spend decades behind bars reading about the latest millionaire fraudster or Republican apparatchik to get out of jail free.

Look, we’ve always been more than delusional about praising U.S. justice as the supposed envy of the free world despite the reality that rich kids or celebrities like the late O.J. Simpson who hire the best lawyers can walk free after people die, and white-collar crime is treated as a sport, while Black, brown, and poorer defendants form the backbone of one of the planet’s highest incarceration rates.

But the Prairieland most-of-your-life sentences didn’t happen in a vacuum. They are the counterweight to Trump’s Day One pardons for the roughly 1,500 right-wing rioters on Jan. 6, 2021, who stormed and vandalized the U.S. Capitol in an insurrection blamed for five immediate deaths, with more than 140 police officers injured.

And that’s not all. Trump has individually pardoned and granted clemency to well over 100 or so others in his second term — including just about every high-ranking Republican who’d been convicted of a federal crime, big-time donors to his political campaigns, or those who hired the president’s friends for big bucks.

At the same time the Prairieland 9 were getting frontier justice, the New York Times reported that Trump’s Justice Department quashed a criminal probe into the circumstances behind the president’s clemency for a multimillionaire named David Gentile. The private equity executive had been sentenced to seven years in prison and ordered to pay $15.5 million in restitution for a $1.6 billion scheme that defrauded small investors. Many lost their life savings — arguably a greater harm than anything that happened at the Texas ICE detention center.

But Trump granted clemency to Gentile after just two weeks in prison. Prosecutors were looking into the relationship between Gentile and a retired priest from Queens who has become a top supporter and personal friend of Trump and who lobbied the president for Gentile’s release. But higher-ups reportedly told New York mid-level prosecutors to end their probe into questions like whether the priest was paid.

In a matter of months, Trump has exploited the existing cracks in the federal justice system to make it a blunt instrument of personalist dictatorship — a “purge” for his criminal friends or bad guys willing to make a donation, while depriving those who dissent of their liberty.

I’m just barely scratching the surface, as Trump’s injustice department also conducts high-profile investigations into law-abiding political opponents, including top Democrats or people like former FBI chief James Comey. Or consider this: No action has been taken against Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who’s been publicly identified as the killer of unarmed Minneapolis motorist Renee Good. When a Syracuse, N.Y., woman ID’d Ross and asked why he had not been indicted in an Instagram post, federal agents entered a voting place where she was working as a poll worker and ordered her to take the inarguably true post down.

The nation’s founders, who declared American independence 250 years ago this week, strongly believed that justice was the backbone of their experiment in democracy. The Bill of Rights they’d enact in 1791 is largely about the right to a fair trial, avoiding unlawful searches and seizures, and the essential liberty of protesting an unjust government. More than two centuries later, the White House seems more governed by George Orwell’s 1984, as they criminalize left-wing “thoughtcrime.”

“I think it’s very symbolic … that this protest happened on the Fourth of July,” the Texas activist Hutcherson told me. “This year is the 250th year of America being America. And when we think about the inception of this nation, it was because of protest; it was because of dissent. And so it feels very contradictory that because someone has leftist or anti-fascist views that now they can be deemed criminal or a terrorist to the U.S. government. You know, we’re not seeing the same energy given toward people that have right-wing views.”

The firecrackers of dissent that went off on Independence Day 2025 over an ICE gulag in Texas were much more of a tribute to what America was supposed to be than whatever Trump detonates over his morally empty National Mall on this July Fourth. In a United States with liberty for billionaires and justice for none, what are we even celebrating?

As we approach the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, I can’t help recalling my 1999 visit to the Central Asian republic of Turkmenistan, whose dictator had a fetish for white marble architecture decorated with gold.

As I drove around the dusty capital of Ashgabat, it was impossible to escape Saparmurad Niyazov’s face.

It was emblazoned on banners hanging from government buildings and appeared on every denomination of paper currency. Statues of the dictator (I learned there were more than 2,200 of them in a country of 4.2 million people) loomed all around the city. The oil fields of this desert backwater funded Niyazov’s whims. Much of the country’s budget went into his private slush fund — all while he slashed resources for healthcare and renamed the months of January and April after himself and his mother.

What sticks out most vividly among my memories, as President Donald Trump turns our nation’s Semiquincentennial into a celebration of himself — festooning government buildings with huge banners of his face and holding a political rally on the mall Wednesday to kick off July Fourth events — is Niyazov’s arch.

The three-legged arch, sitting in the center of Ashgabat, supported an observation tower that, at 226 feet, soared higher than the nearby presidential palace. The structure was topped by a 36-foot gold plated statue of the Asian potentate that rotated constantly to face the sun. Perhaps if the planned 250-foot high “Arch de Trump” ever gets built, and blocks the view of Arlington National Cemetery, the face on the gold winged figure atop the memorial will look familiar.

It seems all dictators and wannabes have the same instincts: to build grandiose monuments of marble and gold, the bigger the better, in order to impress their subjects with their magnificence. Back in Ashgabat all that seemed bizarrely amusing. Whoever thought it could happen here?

Instead of honoring the country’s founding values and documents in this year’s celebrations, Trump is performing like a wannabe Niyazov of Turkmenistan.

The main point of the Declaration of Independence was that governments “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,” i.e., the people. The 13 colonies were quitting the British Empire because they refused to submit to a monarch who tried to rule by decree, rather than respect the elected representatives from the colonies.

Trump, who disdains any restraints on his powers and wants to rig election rules so they guarantee GOP victories, is turning the meaning of the Fourth of July on its head. I find it personally painful how this distortion has changed attitudes toward the United States all around the world.

For decades I’ve reported on the struggles of other countries to achieve the kind of free elections that most Americans have taken for granted for decades. I had the privilege of bearing witness to struggles for some form of democracy in the Soviet Union and China, in new post-Soviet nations, during the 1980s upheavals in the Philippines and South Korea, during the Arab Spring revolts, in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, and during the post-Taliban interval in Afghanistan.

Those who struggled for the right to choose their leaders often paid a terrible price. More often than not, their struggles failed or have been reversed after brief periods of freedom.

Throughout those struggles, the U.S. election system was a lodestar – even though reformers abroad may have opposed specific U.S. foreign policies or the U.S. exercise of overweening power. That admiration was especially evident in the ’80s and ’90s inside communist countries that were trying to break away from their past.

Russians listened to Voice of America (now nearly shuttered by Trump) and would eagerly query me about U.S. politics on my yearly visits to Moscow during those decades.

In 1989, I shadowed then-President of the Soviet Republic of Russia Boris Yeltsin for a day when he visited the room where the Declaration of Independence was adopted inside Independence Hall. He asked the National Park ranger how the American colonies apportioned power between states and central government after independence. I realized only later that he was preparing to take Russia out of the Soviet Union and wanted tips on how the Founding Fathers managed their exit from the British Empire.

In May 1989, Chinese students erected a 33-foot-tall Goddess of Democracy statue in Tiananmen Square inspired by the Statue of Liberty. I was in Poland at the time, observing that country’s first free parliamentary elections on June 5 that were won by Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement. But on June 4, I watched with horror on television, along with Polish colleagues, as the Chinese army sent tanks into Tiananmen Square.

Yet, despite hundreds to thousands of deaths (the exact figure is still unknown), Chinese democrats didn’t give up. In the 1990s, I reported on their efforts to press the central government to permit village, and then town, elections. I interviewed law students at top universities who traveled to small villages to instruct peasants on their rights according to Chinese laws that were ignored by officials.

This progress has been totally reversed by China’s hard-line dictator Xi Jinping, who also crushed democratic institutions in once autonomous Hong Kong. But as recently as 2023, it was inspiring to hear Hong Kong high schoolers, who were protesting the ongoing crackdown by Beijing, recite from memory their rights under law as they had learned in civics classes. Since then, such classes have been banned, and students must memorize rote lessons on “patriotic education” or “Xi Jinping thought.”

It saddens me now to hear self-exiled Russian liberals or Hong Kong democrats or visiting Chinese who once worked for some form of democracy at home, express shock at Trump’s attacks on America’s democratic institutions and efforts to rig elections. Repeatedly, I get the same questions expressed with genuine bewilderment: Why isn’t it possible to stop him from doing this? How is it possible that this can happen in the United States?

Ukrainians, who have fought bravely for more than four years to save their independence from Vladimir Putin’s imperialism, ask me how a U.S. president can back a dictator who hates the West, and wants to restore the Soviet empire. As Independence Day approaches, POTUS continues to ignore the parallel between Ukraine’s courageous struggle for freedom and ours long ago against the imperial British.

Europeans have given up on Trump, and I understand why, having watched Vice President JD Vance at the 2025 Munich Security Conference praise far right, neo-Nazi parties and demean Europe’s democracies. Trump, Elon Musk, and other MAGA acolytes continue to support extremist Europeans whose values would make the Founding Fathers gag.

So it isn’t surprising that a new Pew Research Center poll reveals a steep decline in the popularity of the United States worldwide, especially over the past year. Only a median of 37% of adults polled across 36 countries hold a favorable opinion of our nation. Only 23% express confidence in Trump’s leadership of world affairs, ranking him behind Putin and Xi.

But what is even more striking is that only 39% believe the U.S. government respects the personal freedoms of its own citizens. This is how the world now views a country that was once seen as a beacon of democracy.

During July Fourth celebrations across the country, in places far away from Trump’s pollution of the capital, I hope Americans will reflect on what the Founding Fathers bequeathed to us 250 years ago. For inspiration, reread the Declaration of Independence and brainstorm with friends, colleagues, and family on how to prevent the president from desecrating its principles at the polls come November.

It was a career-defining moment for young Marlon Brando in The Wild One when a dancing girl asked his 1950s bongo-pounding biker-gang character, “What are you rebelling against?”

“Whaddya got?”

Brando’s Johnny Strabler would have felt right at home Saturday afternoon with about 300 rebellious souls who lined the busy shopping stretch of Baltimore Pike in front of the Springfield Mall — just one of the more than 3,300 protests from coast-to-coast and around the world that marked the third “No Kings” day since last June.

Whaddya got? What isn’t there in the second coming of Donald Trump for today’s rebels with way too many causes, as an American president flexing dictatorial powers bounces from his illegal, undeclared war on Iran one minute to trashing the Kennedy Center the next?

There were loud echoes from the 1960s in the peace signs and “No War” placards carried by marchers who’d been a tad too young for Vietnam, yet one also waved the “Gen Z revolution” flag of the straw-hatted pirate from the popular anime, One Piece. Not to mention the matching-costumed 8-foot “Dinosaurs for Democracy” with their campaign sign, “Giant Meteor 2026.”

Sure, the demonstration was primarily about the war in the Middle East that costs nearly $2 billion a day and yet lacks congressional approval, and the secret-police brutality of the regime’s immigration raiders, and the big spike in healthcare costs, and the coverup of the Epstein files, and the massive grift. But for a few hours on a sunny yet bitterly cold Pennsylvania Saturday in late March, it was about more than the sum of its parts — it was something spiritual.

“You feel less isolated when you see everybody here, and then they feel less isolated,” Nancy Harris, a 62-year-old retired mental-health crisis counselor from Prospect Park, told me over the steady car honks from supportive motorists. “And I think it just motivates people in general…just putting good vibes out into the universe.” Her purple-framed peace sign read “All you need is love” on the flip side.

Harris was one of what organizers estimated was an incredible 8 million Americans who took to the streets to register their utter disgust with the authoritarian bent and the increasing violence of the Donald Trump regime. It was arguably the biggest one-day protest in just under 250 years of American history (unless you count the first Earth Day in 1970, which was more of a teach-in.)

The size of the third “No Kings” event was remarkable, yet that was matched by the passion of the marchers, and by a movement with a growing sense of style. That was epitomized by Bruce Springsteen singing his protest anthem “The Streets of Minneapolis” before a massive Twin Cities crowd that also included Sen. Bernie Sanders and folk singer Joan Baez, who were both on the National Mall to hear the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” in 1963. The reverb of history was deafening.

Yet again, much of the mainstream media seemed not to hear it. For part of the weekend, America’s largest newsroom, the New York Times, buried news of the protests on its homepage below six articles about the Iran War, and paired with a cynical news analysis questioning whether the “No Kings” movement has the right focus to be successful.

Never mind that the sense of unity and shared community that I saw Saturday in my home Delaware County or the prior two “No Kings” protests is what has offered hope to the everyday citizens who resisted ICE raids in Minnesota and elsewhere, or to the voters in 30 consecutive jurisdictions who flipped seats away from Trump’s GOP.

True, the “No Kings” movement shouldn’t be above criticism. The protest’s mission can seem vague when compared to the pointed 1960s marches to end the war in Vietnam or racial segregation in the South, although allowing demonstrators to paint on its blank canvass is what creates such a large turnout against autocracy.

As Trump’s crimes against humanity worsen from Minneapolis to Minab, it’s fair to question whether “No Kings” needs to consider more assertive forms of nonviolent civil disobedience, even as that would risk conflict with America’s militarized police.

But leaders with the most prominent Trump-resistance group organizing “No Kings” answered that complaint Saturday when Indivisible’s Ezra Levin took to the stage in Minneapolis and announced that a nationwide general strike is planned for May 1, modeled after a successful local action that shut down much of that region in January.

Calling the plan “a tactical escalation,” Levin said that the May Day strike would be “saying, ‘No business as usual.’ No work, no school, no shopping. We’re going to show up and say we’re putting workers over billionaires and kings.”

And yet what the small but growing chorus of naysayers — especially jaded pundits at some of the bigger media outlets — doesn’t understand is that the impact of “No Kings” isn’t so much political, in the realpolitik sense, as it is psychological.

It’s a hope-building exercise that reminds the citizens who want America to remain a democracy that we are the majority. That matters because dictatorship only succeeds with a demoralized public.

“I feel better when I leave [”No Kings”], because I’ve been down the last two weeks,” Kristina Shickley, a 72-year-old speech pathologist from Ridley Park, told me. She was standing on the sidewalk in front of Springfield Mall with a gaggle of white female boomers, the group that has anchored the Trump resistance since his first term.

Her fellow protesters chimed in with similar reasons for coming out with their hopes that even some Republicans in Congress might pull back from Trump-flavored extremism because of the growing wave of unrest, and their belief in a political science theory that a regime can fall if just 3.5% of the public takes to the streets (that would be about 11 million, so…almost there).

“All these people coming out,” Shickley said. “It gives you hope.”

Especially in Springfield, an old-school, mostly working-class suburb that’s about as all-American as its fictional counterpart on TV’s The Simpsons. For decades, Springfield was Ground Zero for a Republican political machine that ran Delaware County and helped carry Pennsylvania for the likes of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Times have changed. In recent months, as many as 100 or more local residents have stood on the corner of Baltimore Pike and Route 320 every Saturday, waving signs like “No Kings, No Wanna-Be Dictators, No ICE Raids” and “When Injustice Becomes Law, Resistance Becomes Duty.”

It’s hard to imagine a more appropriate spot than in front of a Target store, whose rejection of diversity policies has sparked nationwide boycotts, and a mall that witnessed one of America’s first mass shootings — the 1985 rampage by Sylvia Seegrist that left three dead and now feels like a harbinger of darker times ahead.

Most of the demonstrators were old enough to remember that day, but not all. I met the guy with the anime pirate flag — Andrew Snyder, a 37-year-old software engineer from Swarthmore and a self-described democratic socialist who served during peacetime with the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf. He agreed that not as many Millennials are out marching now, but predicted that “it’s going to ramp up with AI [artificial intelligence], as AI starts taking jobs.”

For now, however, the heart and soul of “No Kings” may be people like 75-year-old John Coia, a Springfield native now living in Aston who once sued his former employer USAir over his right to wear long hear and an earring. Now sporting an Abraham Lincoln-esque grey beard he amplified with a top hat, Coia waved an upside-down American flag.

“I’ve been going up against the establishment my whole life,” said Coia, speaking for a generation that grew up exercising its all-American right of free speech and, now in old age, is determined to keep using it while they still can. I asked him what was the last straw with Trump that convinced him to join “No Kings.”

“There is no last straw,” he said over the car honks. “It just keeps going. There’s a new straw every day.”