No Kings Day: “It’s Gonna Be Fun”—Plus, “One Battle After Another”

Jon Wiener:  From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show,
we’ll talk about the movie critics have called “a forthrightly antifascist film” that is “wild and thrilling” — of course, that’s “One Battle After Another,” the Paul Thomas Anderson movie starring Leonardo di Caprio as a burnt-out left-wing bomber. John Powers will comment.  But first: Saturday is No Kings day! We’ll talk about it with Leah Greenberg, co-founder of the group Indivisible – in a minute.
[BREAK]This Saturday, October 18^th, will be the second No King’s Day, a day of protest, to challenge Trump and defend democracy. For comment, we turn to Leah Greenberg. She’s co-founder and co-executive director of the Indivisible Project, a grassroots movement of thousands of local Indivisible groups working to elect progressive leaders, rebuild our democracy, and defeat the Trump agenda. Last time we talked was right after the first No Kings Day in June. Leah Greenberg, welcome back. 

Leah Greenberg: Great to be here. 

JW:  That first No Kings Day, June 14^th, was the same day as Trump’s birthday parade. That was the one with the tanks in the streets of Washington DC.  You remember — the parade that nobody went to. How many people went to No King’s Day protests that day? 

LG: Our estimate is about 5 million people went to no King’s protests around the country — at around 2100 events.

JW: 5 million people at 2100 events. Is it possible that this one will be bigger? 

LG: Well, we have on our map right now over 2,500. So what I can tell you is, without knowing — you never want to over promise before the actual day of — but I can tell you that there will be even more widespread coverage across the country than there was in June. 

JW: And how is No Kings Day organized? Indivisible sends out instructions to 5 million people, and they do what you tell them?

LG: We work with a really incredible coalition of organizations from across the ecosystem, representing everyone who is collectively coming together to oppose this administration — from labor to our friends in the progressive ecosystem, in the civil rights community, to faith communities, to veterans organizations. We collectively come together to form kind of a core that’s putting on the central operating mechanism. And then we open up registration of events to people all over the country. These are often local Indivisible leaders or local 50501 leaders or an organization that might not have a national affiliation, but they are often and most commonly regular people who have come together in a group in their town, in their city, to collectively put this on for their community members. And so we send out that call people register the events. We work directly with those hosts of the events on training, on messaging, on how to put together a program — and especially on safety, security, and de-escalation, to make sure that we’ve got collective coverage with really joyful, peaceful, high quality events all over the country. 

JW: I grew up in St. Paul, and we remember the day before the first No Kings, when the leader of the Democratic legislature in Minnesota, Melissa Hortman, was assassinated by an anti-abortion activist.  Twin Cities Indivisible had planned a big rally at the state capitol downtown St. Paul, but the killer was still on the loose that morning, and the rally organizers had to decide whether to cancel it. Remind us what happened then. 

LG: State organizers and the organizers of the Minnesota folks decided to go forward.  And it was a really, really extraordinary choice, right? They said that they were going to move forward and honor Speaker Hortman and her memory. And my understanding is around 25,000 people showed up at the Capitol in that moment. 

JW: And Attorney General Keith Ellison gave a powerful speech.
Now, Speaker Mike Johnson talked about us on Fox News last Friday. He said, ‘these people have a Hate America rally that’s scheduled for October 18^th’– he said on the National Mall – ‘it’s all the pro Hamas wing and the Antifa people.’ He said, ‘they’re all coming out.’
He’s talking here about some of the organizing partners like the nurses union, the Sierra Club, and Planned Parenthood. Why do you think Speaker Mike Johnson is saying those things about us? 

LG: Well, I think it’s both ridiculous, and quite sinister, in equal parts. I think the ridiculous piece of this is these folks are 10 days, 12 days into a shutdown, and they understand that they are totally losing the thread on that.  Their messaging is not landing. People are blaming them, correctly, because they are shutting down the government to prevent people from getting healthcare. And they’re grasping at straws and trying to find anything at all that they can kind of grapple onto, that maybe shifts the energy off of them. And so they’ve landed on this bizarre attack on No Kings as part of that. So that’s the part that’s ridiculous.
The part that I think is more concerning and more sinister is really that we have to put this in the context of a Trump administration escalation on civil society and on peaceful dissent that’s been in the works this entire time, but has radically escalated after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. We are seeing reporting about their intention to label basically the entire opposition infrastructure, from ActBlue to philanthropy to organizations like Indivisible, to label them in ways that would allow them to kind of go after, repress, crack down on, peaceful protest and organizing. And I think we’ve got to understand, we’ve got to see what Speaker Johnson, what multiple members of the Senate and House Republican caucuses have said about the No Kings rallies in that light, as creating the permission structure for Stephen Miller’s campaign of repression. 

JW:  They have House speaker Mike Johnson. We have Robert De Niro — who made a video for Indivisible’s Instagram page. He referred to the American Revolution as ‘the original No Kings.’ He said, ‘we’ve had two and a half centuries of democracy since then. Often challenging, sometimes messy, always essential. We fought in two world wars to preserve it. Now we have a would-be king who wants to take it away: King Donald, the first. F that!’
How did you get Robert De Niro to do a video for Indivisible’s Instagram page? 

LG: Well, we started asking around.  What we’ve seen with the No Kings protests is that people are really eager to get involved. People are coming out of the woodwork and saying, ‘how can I help? How can I be part of this?’ And not necessarily always the usual suspects, right? And so I think we reached out, we said ‘we’re looking for folks to help spread the word and help spread the word in places where we might not necessarily be able to reach, as a primarily political organization.’ And Robert DeNiro raised his hand and said…

JW: As far as I can tell, the biggest difference between the first No King’s Day and this Saturday is that the first No King’s Day had no event in Washington DC — because of Trump’s birthday parade.  But this Saturday there will be a No King’s protest in DC. Tell us about the plans for that one. 

LG: Absolutely.  That protest, it’s very heavily influenced obviously by what has happened since June in DC, which has been the deployment of the National Guard, an incredibly heavy ICE presence, a real attack on DC’s ability and right to govern its own affairs. Even as an enormous amount of money has been stolen from DC residents who pay taxes that they paid have been taken out of DC’s budget. And so it was important to us in this moment, when we’re not trying to challenge the narrative over something like a military parade happening in DC, we wanted to really be in solidarity with the people of DC and making sure that there’s a popular understanding of what is happening and why it’s directly in contradiction to the wishes of the people of DC.
So there will be a DC event. It will feature a combination of national, nationally prominent figures, and DC speakers and organizers. We really want to bring those two stories together, because fundamentally, the attack on DC, the attack on home rule, is part of the bigger story of the attack on democracy in this country. And you cannot be okay with what is happening in DC and oppose the broader Trump agenda. 

JW: And where is this going to be happening In DC?

LG: It is on Pennsylvania Avenue– Third and Pennsylvania Avenue, 12 o’clock.

JW: Third and Pennsylvania, 12 o’clock.
You spoke about preparing for possible problems, partly because of the sinister aspects of the Republican ‘comments,’ let us say.  The safety and security training that’s been going on this week and before this week has been an important part of No King’s Day for organizers and monitors. Tell us what this focuses on. I know the keyword here is ‘practice de-escalation.’

LG: For anybody who’s hosting these events, we want to make sure people have planned, have prepared, understand what the key practice around safety with something like this is. Whether that’s having the right and appropriate kinds of crowd control and safety marshals, whether that’s what to do in the event that there are counter-protestors, how to make sure that people stay safe, and avoid confrontation. All of that is wrapped into a comprehensive set of safety trainings that we do with everybody who is a host of these events. And then a kind of general training that we make available to the broader public as well. So we’re really working very hard. I think at this point, we’ve trained tens of thousands of people in safety and de-escalation for protests like this to make sure that everybody who’s attending has an opportunity to access that information. And anybody who’s involved in putting one of these on is actively making the safety plans for their local event. 

JW: And if people want to join one of the safety trainings for the rest of this week? 

LG: NoKings.org, we’ve got ’em all on the website there. 

JW: NoKings.org.
One of the things I love about No Kings is that map — the fact that there are so many events in so many littler places. I grew up in Minnesota, as I said. Up north in Minnesota–I checked–there are No Kings rallies in Duluth, where my father grew up; on the North shore of Lake Superior at Two Harbors, where he had a summer house; farther north at Grand Marais. And there’s No Kings Day in International Falls, the northernmost town of the lower 48 states, that one is at Smoky Bear Park, just across the Rainy River from Canada. There’s No Kings Day in northern Wisconsin, in Superior, where my mother grew up. And this is everywhere. The map shows No Kings Day this Saturday at a thousand places — actually 2000 places. The map is wonderful. 

LG: It is, and it speaks to the sheer range and depth of the opposition. And I think something that is not necessarily getting picked up in mainstream media right now is just how much broader and wider what we’re seeing is right now than anything we have seen in the past. And I’ll just give you one example here. The single largest protest of the first Trump administration where the really incredible ‘Families Belong Together’ rallies against family separation, in 2018. There were about 750 of those events all over the country.
And so what we are seeing this year — with Hands Off, we had about 1300; with No Kings One, 2100. This is going to hit 2,500. We’re literally seeing four times as many of these events taking place all over the country, which is just kind of an extraordinary level of reach into areas that have not historically had this kind of pro-democracy progressive representation.
I think one of the things that’s really beautiful is you zoom in on some of the places that we think of as pretty red, and you see the events in local towns. There are people who are bringing together that rally, that event. And what I can tell you, because we’re now four months out from No Kings, is that a lot of those folks, maybe this was the first time that they organized something, but they don’t stop there. We have so many groups that are, ‘I’m No Kings for my city, because we came together for this protest and now we’re actually staying together and organizing as a local hub for infrastructure’ or registering as a new Indivisible group. It actually helps to catalyze this kind of virtuous cycle of organizing and community that is what’s going to carry us forward. 

JW: We’ve talked here about the security and de-escalation trainings. I just want to emphasize, at least here in LA, the No Kings protest I went to the first time was a really happy event, a really fun event. Everyone was excited to see the turnout. It was really a wonderful day. 

LG: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And that is overwhelmingly what people have told me about their experience of No Kings, right? It felt good to be together with so many people who are collectively throwing in to fight for democracy, to fight for our neighbors. It felt powerful, it felt meaningful. It gave them energy for what we need to do next. And so much of what we’re trying to do here is create this shared understanding that we have in this country an extraordinary and big and powerful movement for democracy. And part of how you feel that is you all come out on the same day and you’re part of something together. 

JW: Last question: where will you be on No Kings Day, this Saturday?

LG: I will be in Washington DC.

JW: So in America we have No Thrones, No Crowns — and No Kings. No Kings Day is this Saturday. Check the website NoKings.org to find an event near you. The last one was wonderful. This one could be the biggest day of protest in American history.
Leah Greenberg is co-founder and co-executive director of the Indivisible Project. She’s one of our heroes. Leah, thanks for all your work — and thanks for talking with us today. 

LG: Thanks for having me on.
[BREAK]

JW: Now it’s time to talk about the movie that critics have called ‘a forthrightly anti-fascist film’ that is ‘magnificent,’ ‘wild,’ and ‘thrilling.’ We’re talking of course about ‘One Battle After Another,’ the Paul Thomas Anderson film starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a burnt out left wing bomber, Sean Penn as a vicious white nationalist captain of ICE, who is sexually tormented by Teyana Taylor as a gun-toting Black revolutionary, and Benicio del Toro as a charismatic hero of underground resistance.  For comment, we turn to John Powers – he’s critic at large on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, where he has an audience of millions. John, welcome back.

JP: Happy to be here, Jon.

JW: I have to say I hated the politics of the movie’s first half hour, which seemed to celebrate the tactics of a Weatherman-like left-wing terrorist group, led by Black women with guns, who hold up banks, liberate captive refugees, and blow up power lines with the help of white allies. That power line attack is so successful that it turns an entire city dark. Maybe it’s LA or San Diego or something. I can’t imagine anything that would create more popular support for Trump’s military occupation of cities.  And the bank holdup begins with a Black woman with a gun striding back and forth on the counter shouting, ‘this is the face of Black power,’ but then our Black heroine shoots a bank guard, who is also Black, and ends up being caught by the cops. That’s the first part of the film. 
But then there’s a long second part 16 years later, which is — different.

JP: Yes. What happened 16 years later is that clearly the revolution that the group, ‘the French 75,’ thought they were pulling off in fact did not take place. That in fact, that the sources of power and authority are more fascist than they were before, and that the people we were following have all taken on a different dimension. Some have fled, some are hiding out like the Leonardo DiCaprio character. Some have betrayed the revolution. One thing that remains is that Stephen j Lockjaw, the evil military ice guy played by Sean Penn, is obsessed with these people, in particular with finding the daughter of the Black Revolutionary, whose name is Perfidia Beverly Hills, in a Pynchonesque touch, and he wants to find her for reasons that become clear as the plot goes on.

JW: I want to complain about the first part just a little bit more. Black women with guns: is this really ‘thrilling’? It’s a little bit off to portray Black women with guns — or without guns — as the leaders of a movement to hide and defend undocumented people who have after all come from Central America and Mexico. There was recently a real movement led by Black women, Black Lives Matter, but they didn’t have guns. They were a nonviolent group that organized millions of people into huge demonstrations,  And even the Black Panther women of the early seventies didn’t pose with guns. That was the world of the Symbionese Liberation Army, that tiny group in the Bay Area that kidnapped Patty Hearst in 1974 and robbed banks.  That was the group that had the great slogan, ‘death to the fascist insect!’
In ‘One Battle After Another,” as you say, the Weatherman politics of the first part is not only defeated, it’s kind of renounced and proven to be a dead end.  But meanwhile the real work of protecting undocumented people continues without them.

JP: Yes, that’s true. That is the work of Benicio del Toro figure who is a karate instructor by day and kind of underground railroad protector-type figure by night. They call him ‘the sensei,’ and what is remarkable about the movie is that the sequence that he’s in, which is kind of almost the center of the movie, is I think one of the great sequences in recent movies — from just the beautiful way when you see his storefront with the cars going behind the window, to him moving through his house, and you realizing all the different levels of his house and all the people who were working for him; and his calm and centeredness — in a film where Leonardo DiCaprio is playing the frantic guy, in a bathrobe much of the time, running away from ICE.  And Sean Penn is locked in as a kind of, if you could imagine a refugee from ‘Dr. Strangelove’ who worked for ICE 60 years later, that’s the Sean Penn performance.  And then at the center of it is the person who’s helping people make their lives, helping ’em escape from ICE, and not doing it in any way violently. On the contrary, it almost seems like the karate thing, which is kind of a martial arts defensive thing rather than shooting up banks. I would want to go back just to disagree with you a bit —

JW: Please!

JP: — on the opening, because the thing that listeners should realize is that this isn’t taking place during the Weatherman era. If you assumed that the ‘16 years later’ of the film is more or less now, that means that all of this stuff that’s happening — and we’re told that Leonardo DiCaprio is in his forties — all of this is happening maybe in 2005, which is to say that it’s not based on anything that actually happened. I don’t remember attacks on banks by left-wing groups in 2005, so they might as well be led by Black women because in fact they are an imaginary swirl. I think Paul Thomas Anderson is probably trying to suggest, in this ratcheted up world, the Black women who are doing all sorts of great stuff with Black Lives Matter, for instance, they are doing this then too. I don’t find that a stretch, given that nothing else in the film is realistic.

JW: The chronology thing is completely goofy because the first scenes show what is clearly Trump’s border wall.  And the refugees are being treated in cages that look very much like what Trump is doing today. So we think for the first half hour we are in the present. And indeed Trump’s wall didn’t exist in 2005.

JP: Yes. So actually we may well be in the future then with the second part, the point being that it is an alternative reality in the way that the explicit model for the film, although it’s not a copy of it, is Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Vineland,’ which is more historically based. It actually does take place at real historical times, but nevertheless is offering an alternative version of reality that’s so wild that certain details you can’t really complain about because it’s a Thomas Pynchon novel and this is in that same spirit. 
But I can see that would be exasperating at the beginning because you’re following Leonardo DiCaprio, sort of the house hero of American movies. So if he’s doing all this stuff, you’re assuming that the film must be supporting it. It’s only later, when you realize that he’s kind of a sad sack doofus, that far from being a wise man, he’s a person who’s usually high on something, and not very good at much of anything.

JW: Critics say this is a comic and unrealistic film. But the portrayal of the refugees is totally realistic: the camps they are kept in at the border, the safe house that Benicio del Toro has created. This is practically documentary.

JP: Well, that’s part of one thing. I think that’s maybe some way part of the Pychonesque quality of it, which is that it flips between tones so wildly that when you were saying you didn’t like the beginning, I can see that because it takes so long to get your bearings, and then at any given point you can’t be quite sure. The scene where Perfidia Beverly Hills first excites Sean Penn, who we’ve seen like ogling her bottom earlier, but then basically she insists that he get an erection and she sexually humiliates him, and yet he likes it at some level, as well as hating and wanting to destroy her, but wanting to sleep with her. You have that, and at the same time you do have people in cages and you do have the documentary things, and you do have people you like getting murdered. There’s a very shocking scene when after one of the people rats out the group, there are characters you’ve been following, and they are killed so quickly. They just walked from a door and their head’s blown off.  And the violence of that is so intense that kind of knocks you back as well, because you thought they were kind of joking, but then they’re not joking. So the tone is very crazy and wild. The arc of it is from a kind of crazy thoughtless violence that achieves nothing, to running away, to meeting the person who actually is doing something that actually is making the world better, to then dealing with the fact that the fascists really are in charge.

JW: I think we need to talk about the fact that the second part is above all a father-daughter story. This is also a movie about a good dad, and the 16-year-old daughter is played wonderfully by Chase Infinity. Is that another of Pynchon made-up names, like ‘Perfidia Beverly Hills’?

JP: I know. It is funny. You think, I think, it could easily be a real name. It doesn’t seem like a real name.

JW: It is her name though. She has been in other movies, the same person and name.

JP: Yes. But it is funny how the world is moving toward Pynchon.

JW: So there’s a good dad — DiCaprio — and then there’s a bad dad, A really bad dad.

JP: A really bad dad. Yes, and that’s I guess the emotional center of it: that one wants the daughter for good, one wants the daughter for evil. There’s some question of who’s the father of the daughter, because Perfidia Beverly Hills is — her name might hint at a certain perfidiousness, so you can’t quite be sure where she comes down on anything, so you have all that. Then you have an additional thing, just to make it more exciting: you have hitmen hired basically to do hits on hitmen, which is kind of a wild and crazy thing.

JW: And there is a sophisticated argument about power on the right under fascism: ICE is not the real power here. The real moving force is a ruling class group that calls itself the Christmas Adventurers Club. They are militant white nationalists. They’re militant Christians.  And they control ICE.

JP: Yes. That in some ways is closer to a contemporary world than we would like to think.  Like when you listen to or you follow certain tech people and you realize, oh, they’re obviously racist and they’re insanely rich and they are pulling lots of puppet strings in Washington.
You think this is  kind of comic, once again, it’s Pynchon’s version of that, and of course they of have roots all the way back to the founding father racists. It is the tradition and it’s made explicit here in this kind of comical sounding group, except the fact that this comical sounding group are killers. They don’t do the killing themselves, but they’re killers.

JW: Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian said the film is about ‘the lonely heroism of not fitting in.’ I actually thought it was the opposite. I thought that one of the themes of the film is ‘we are everywhere.’ The nurses at the hospital help Bob escape. The skateboarders are wonderful activists. The nuns are part of the resistance. The little Latino kids across the street know how to run the alert system.  And who wouldn’t want to fit in with Benicio del Toro?

JP: Oh, I know. I mean, he’s the hero of the movie. The old movie critic in me would say he’s actually giving the best performance in the movie. DiCaprio and Sean Penn are giving the flashy performances, but Benicio del Toro is giving the relaxed movie star performance that in fact conveys that without working hard at it.  The other two guys are working really hard.
But you’re right, it is about solidarity, and even the ending is about joining up with other people. It’s not about being all alone. There’s an interesting part of all of this because Paul Thomas Anderson, who wrote it, is from a generation that is younger than yours and mine, so that in fact, he never did have this kind of organization stuff going on around him when he was younger. It’s all imagined for him. There’s that way in which I think the critic Richard Brody in the New Yorker was saying, it’s almost about the psychology of it rather than the actual politics of it. Because in fact, most people under the age of 50 haven’t been in political movements, but they can imagine what it’s like, the feelings of what it’s like, and there’s a lot of that in the film.  But there are actual politics. Benicio del Toro organizing the community so that everybody works together. They all know what’s going on, and it’s done in this wonderful Pynchonesque kind of way because Pynchon is the touchstone here, where underneath the surface of things there is this entire existing vital living society trying to fight power, which is a quintessential Pynchon idea.

JW: And in other ways this is a very conventional film, especially in its conclusion, where there’s a long car chase – a really well done car chase. There’s nothing more American in movies than a car chase.

JP: No, there is, but I would say that sometimes when we’re talking about films, especially a film by someone as talented as Paul Thomas Anderson, it’s worth pointing out that his car chase doesn’t look like other car chases. The use of going up and down the hills is kind of dreamy and spectacular and is using the hills in ways you haven’t really quite seen before and the people disappearing then looming over the horizon and it’s spectacular in the same way. The scene that I love with Benicio del Toro, when you’re wandering through the house, just as a piece of filmmaking, it’s just so marvelous — and so much of the film is shot in a way you haven’t seen things shot, because he’s got an original eye and just magnificent kinetic qualities.

JW: I have one other complaint.

JP: I like that. I love your complaints.

JW: It’s not a big complaint, but there’s one image that has fascinated the critics: a Black woman pressing a machine gun against her heavily pregnant belly, and shooting off dozens of rounds, just for fun. Manohla Dargis called that shot ‘A cry from the heart that’s also a crystallizing image of resistance.’ but I couldn’t help thinking, ‘what a terrible thing to do to that baby in the womb.’

JP: Yes. Well, I guess the baby in the womb does turn out to be one of the heroines of the film. I can’t speak for other critics. There’s a lot of projection at the moment of wanting to fire machine guns at people, that somehow firing machine guns against people who seem like fascists entices a lot of people, so I think there’s a lot of excitement in that. It’s interesting that the movie slightly chastises you for liking it so much, because it’s suggesting that is the wrong way to go.  But nevertheless, it’s quite a spectacular image. I don’t blame you for thinking that’s not probably good mothering. Perfidia Beverly Hills is doing other things that aren’t really good mothering either.

JW: They make it very clear that she in fact abandons this child. Yes.

JP: But it is also worth saying that Tayana Taylor, who plays her, is astonishingly charismatic. Fabulous. It’s hard to put her in a movie where she’s playing a normal human being. She pops so much more on screen than almost all the other actors. It’s like she’s a superhero or something. Even in the first film I saw her in, kind of a realistic film where she played a single mother. She’s so alive, it’s like the camera somehow just devours her — and then she devours us, and I think that makes the beginning seem bigger too, somehow.

JW: Any closing thoughts here?

JP: I think my closing thought is that it’s very much the movie of our moment, because it actually does seem to suggest we’re living in a fascist country that isn’t just cruel to immigrants but will kill anybody. A country that’s gotten more fascist than it was, more racist than it was, and that there are people trying to resist, but they do need to resist. 
The film does end with someone going off to join other people resisting. So at that level, that’s also part of the moment. The affirmation of the film is that at the end of it all, there’s a young person who wants to go off and fight for freedom.  And they don’t do it corny. It’s not a big thing. It’s not thrown away, but it’s understated more than in lots of other movies. But the arc of the movie is from violent revolution that doesn’t work, to going off to work with other people to organize against the fascists, and that, I think, is very much the message of the movie. It’s also makes it a movie of right now.

JW: We’re talking of course about ‘One Battle After Another.’ John Powers is critic at large on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross. John, thanks for talking with us today. 

JP: It was a pleasure.