August 29 At about 7:00 this morning, some emails started going around confirming that Trump was coming to Austin today to meet with the governor and other Texas officials. One woman asked, “Is there going to be a protest? I have my signs ready.” By 8:30 many people had reached out to their networks to find out where we could gather. Indivisible posted a Facebook event, Refuse Fascism Austin and Houston sent out to our lists, and others said they would email everyone they knew about it. Trump was scheduled to land at 2:30. By 1:30, people were already gathering outside the Texas Department of Public Safety building where the meeting was supposed to take place.
By 2:30, there were about 200 people waiting, including a group from United We Dream defending DACA, but most of the people I spoke to were not affiliated with any particular group but had simply had enough of Trump. One woman said she wanted him out eight months ago and she wants him out now. While we waited for the motorcade, I talked to people about the call for November 4th – it begins, and especially why we have both the power and responsibility to end this nightmare ourselves. Most people were in agreement that this was a way forward, but that this will take active participation from people like the ones out here today wasn’t contended with as much. One young man said he agreed, but why weren’t we literally in the streets now? He was frustrated that people were sticking to the sidewalks and not stepping outside the bounds of what was allowed. Many people signed up and were very enthusiastic about finding out more, including a professor from Texas State and many UT students. When I told them we would be back at UT on Friday getting students who are walking out against SB4 and attack on DACA into this movement, they were excited and said they would look out for us.
Then a few things happened. First, two Infowars trolls came through the crowd with an American flag. Immediately the protesters flew into action, actually flooding the street and pushing them away, chanting “hey hey ho ho Trump and Pence have got to go”. Eventually the Infowars trolls were forced to crumple up their flag and leave. Infowars has a history of harassing and trolling people at rallies and protests, including immigrants rights rallies and anti-Trump rallies, and the response is often to put signs in their faces and drive them out. Then the motorcade came through, and the crowd again became raucous, still flooding the street and changing “Trump and Pence have got to go” and “Donald Trump has got to go”. People also yelled out things like “Austin Hates You”, and “Texas Hates You”.
After the motorcade went by, most of the crowd went around the corner to the front of the Department of Public Safety Building. We continued our rally there. At first chants were led by the United We Dream youth. They chanted “up up with liberation, down down with deportation”. This was really important, because Hurricane Harvey has been a double nightmare for undocumented immigrants, with not only the storm bearing down on them but the fear of being picked up, detained and deported just for trying to get to safety. A little later, when Trump supporters showed up and started agitating in the crowd and yelling their usual chants, people put forward some different chants that we used to drown them out. “No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA” and the one put forward by Refuse Fascism, “No Ban No Wall the Trump regime has got to fall”.
Most people stayed out there until about 4, when Trump was supposed to be leaving. But a few people stayed behind and gathered around the panel indicting his regime for crimes against humanity – in particular the one we had brought documenting the destruction of the environment it has accomplished and promoted in their first 8 months. (See all the panels here). We talked about various things, including the fact that so much protest is orderly and sanitized now with permits and rules about what can be done, so where is the disruption of business as usual? We talked about how critical mass, getting millions of people into the streets, day after day, would be a disruption, but we agreed that protest as usual was also not going to get this regime out. We ended up talking about how a whole different culture needs to be and could be created from this, what one young woman called the counter culture.
A few things that I noticed. Whereas we used to get more push back about whether it was possible for Americans to overcome their apathy and actually protest day after day, no one brought that up here. There was a general mood of frustration and rage. People had had enough. Except for one woman, no one said we need to wait for 2018 or expressed any real hope that electoral system was going to save us. Charlottesville, and the two weeks following Charlottesville with all the news that came down on the night Hurricane Harvey slammed into Texas, contributed to the sense of urgency. A lot of people carried the no 45 where the 45 was turned into a Nazi swastika. A group of people each held up a letter to spell out the word IMPEACH. One man in a wheelchair carried a sign that said, “Evacuate Trump”, and someone else had a sign that said, “You are a fucking monster.” That sign crystallized so much of what people were feeling, that this was a monstrous man, a monstrous situation, and one that people just cannot tolerate another minute.
Although there was a lot of news media there taking footage of the protest, the protests have not been featured yet in the evening news. I don’t know if some of it will appear tomorrow morning, but there seems to be a media blackout on the fact that even this visit was greeted with hundreds of people protesting, outnumbering a handful of Trump supporters, and that the protest was put together very quickly.
Read: 7 Indictments –
The Crimes Against Humanity
of the Trump/Pence Regime