Women’s March Madness
Documenting the literal genocide of civility and reason
Many thanks to Nika Scothorne, who suggested this post’s new title as a superior alternative to my original Foucault-inspired one.
I didn’t mean to attend a political rally—it’s not the kind of thing I generally do on purpose. When I drove into DC on the Saturday afternoon before the election, I intended to go to the National Gallery of Art, where the only sign of politics is the occasional placard apologizing to museum patrons for an artist’s centuries-old transgression of woke orthodoxy. But as I walked down 14th Street there were signs that, in retrospect, seem to have been foretelling the coming chaos and rage.
First, a small, police-escorted group of protestors marching into Thomas Circle. Their chant didn’t seem pegged to anything currently in the news, except insofar as all the world’s ills—past and present, real and imagined—are of perennial moment to those who need to be mad about something:
Hey hey! Ho ho! Colonialism has got to go!
“Colonialism,” like “racism” and “genocide,” no longer means what it means. Instead, it means whatever a given speaker wants it to mean at a given moment. Because what is meaning, anyway? Vibes and emotions are what really matter, and if I feel that someone’s doing colonialism, who are you to deny my truth? Literality is secondary, and even “literally” now means little more than “kinda sorta.”
Omen number two was on Grindr of all places. I opened the app to see who was around, and behold! a well-built, muscular man in his thirties with an insouciant expression, blonde hair on his chest and abs, piercings in both nipples, not one stitch of clothing, and, concealing his no doubt prodigious member, that one sexy item no boudoir should be without: a camouflage HARRIS-WALZ hat.
This was the third and final omen:
People who aren’t on social media could be excused for thinking this a mere anti-Trump graffito. Those more in the know recognize the 🔻 as the symbol used by Hamas to mark its targets in propaganda videos. After 10/7 it was appropriated by the valiant keyboard jihadists of Twitter to advance the glorious cause of global intifada (and/or harass random Jewish people).
These omens were lost on me at the time. Little did I know that much more chanting, politicking, and #resistance-ing awaited me just around the corner. And that dripping red paint might have been a warning: There will be blood.
If I’d headed east and then south, I would’ve missed it. I could have spent a peaceful afternoon looking at art and learning why nineteenth century French painting is problematic. Instead, I walked straight into Freedom Plaza, where thousands had gathered to have very strong feelings.
What’s going on? What are we protesting now? It didn’t take long to find the answer. There were signs here, too:
The Women’s March. The organization first came on the scene in 2017 with a march against Trump that drew millions of protesters in cities around the country. They soon gained notoriety when people began to notice their board was composed entirely of women not overly fond of Jews. Nevertheless, the event was a hit, and more marches have been held in the years since.
I got a little closer to the stage as an organizer finished her opening remarks and introduced the first speaker, a Piscataway Conoy woman named Hope.
Hope began with a land acknowledgement. “The Piscataway people are STILL HERE!” she thundered. “Indigenous people across Turtle Island are still here!” As she segued into a recitation of colonial atrocities great and small from 1492 to the present day, I scanned the people and the richly variegated protest signs, many advertising niche causes whose proponents vied for the crowd’s attention. An impressive contingent of CODEPINK activists stood on the sidewalk across from the plaza, and I wondered if Medea Benjamin, the “anti-war”1 group’s cofounder and most visible spokeslunatic, was there.
How silly of me! Of course she was:
I moseyed back in the direction of the stage, where Hope was recounting “reports that people at the early polls are facing intimidation, aggressive behaviors from people [at] the polls.” She herself had been subject to such intimidation. “I walked past a Republican woman passing out her sample ballot. And I politely said, ‘No, no thank you.’ And a couple steps away was the Democratic person, passing out our sample ballot. And I told her, ‘I want the non-racist ballot.’”
The crowd laughed and whooped.
The Republican woman went full Karen. “Next thing I knew, that woman had ran around the corner into the forty feet zone, which is restricted, and got in my face! She accosted me, she was aggressive, she was belligerent, and she tried to intimidate me under the context of wanting to explain why she changed parties. I told her I did not care.”
Hope tried to walk away, but the Republican woman persisted. “She was like a dog with a bone.” Hope was, it seemed, trapped. The standoff lasted for two minutes, and might have continued till the polls closed had someone not happened along to tell the Republican woman to back off. Only then was Hope able to get into the building and cast her ballot.
I drifted away again, in search of more fun signs.
There was a commotion close by and getting closer. I turned to look and saw none other than Jesus Christ himself heading my way, pulling his cross behind him on two small wheels. Close on his heels was a young guy in an ill-fitting full length camel-colored coat, shouting incessantly into a bullhorn. Jesus had a microphone of his own, and as they got closer I could start to make out their overlapping streams of patter. Jesus, a forty-ish, freckled redhead in an orange prison jumpsuit with “GUILTY” on the back, was preaching the gospel while bullhorn dude harassed him.
I couldn’t tell if bullhorn dude’s odd manner of speech was a foreign accent or an exotic kind of speech impediment, but as it reminded me of the nihilists in The Big Lebowski with their campy German accents, I’ll call him Uli. He was accompanied by a more reticent young woman I’ll call Amy, who used her own bullhorn rather sparingly.
“Why are you protecting fucking Nazis, piggies?” Uli demanded of our Lord and Savior’s police escort. “Why are you protecting Nazis?” Then turning back to Jesus he chanted, “Why are you such a Nazi? Why are you such a Nazi?” in a childish singsong, like a kindergartner saying “nanny nanny boo boo.”
A man passed by going in the opposite direction. Mid-twenties, like in skin tone to the 44th president, his appreciable bulk swathed in a navy MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! t-shirt. Nobody seemed to notice him. Least of all Uli, who was fully committed to his Pilate bit.
“Pro-life is a lie, you don’t care if women die!” he shouted, his megaphone a foot from Jesus’ face. “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA!”
A CODEPINK lady tempted Christ with a roll of “Feminists stand with Palestine” stickers. An older man accosted him and said something I couldn’t hear. The cops told the man to step aside, “walk and talk.”
“You’re protecting Nazis!” Uli complained. “You’re protecting Nazis right here! These are Nazis walking down the street!”
The men he had just called “piggies” were surprisingly unmoved, perhaps on account of their own Nazi sympathies.
“I’m here to just point people to Jesus,” Jesus said. “Just here to point people to Jesus, Jesus is the savior, everybody needs to look to Jesus. He died on the cross, he rose from the dead, there’s a Heaven and there’s a Hell, and everybody one day is gonna die and have to give an account to God for their life. So we’re just here today to point people to the cross, to point people—”
“We won’t go back! We won’t go back!” Uli blatted. A few others joined in.
“This world is living in sin and so there’s a story unfolding, and we’re just here to lift up Jesus.”
“BOOOO!”
“Dooo unto otherrrrs!” a woman observed.
“BOOOO!”
“I don’t know why the cross makes people so angry.”
“We won’t go back,” Uli droned. “We won’t go back, we won’t go back . . .”
“You’re not even carrying it, you’re wheeling it, pussy!” a man chimed in. If his choice of words offended anyone, they let it slide.
Amy spoke up for the first time: “Were you one of the people at the Capitol?”
Uli seized on this like a hyena on a wildebeest carcass. “Where were you January 6th? Where were you January 6th, Nazi?”
I caught up to him. “Can I ask you something?”
“No.”
“Why are you calling him a Nazi?” I asked.
“Be quiet, not here to talk to you. Where were you January 6th?”
“I was praying for our nation,” Jesus answered.
“Were you at the Capitol?” Amy asked.
“No.”
“Yeah he was,” Uli said.
“Do you support the Capitol rioters?”
“I support Jesus. I just support Jesus. I support Jesus.”
“Do you support the January 6th insurrectionists?”
“I don’t—anybody that broke the law and went into the Capitol, shouldn’t have gone into the Capitol. But anybody that had the right to speak and to protest? Sure, they have—everyone has the right to protest. But no one has the right to break the law. So anybody that broke the law—”
“Like you?” Uli cut in. “You’re guilty—”
“—they shouldn’t’ve done it. There you go,” he finished.
“—that’s why you wanna die, you’re guilty. You’re guilty. You’re guilty.”
Halfway around the plaza, I let the procession proceed without me. Here was another Christian group, apparently unaffiliated with jumpsuit jailhouse Jesus. Their signs were a bit more inflammatory, the rhetoric of their spokesman, who I’ll call Michael, more focused on sin than love.
“He is the mighty creator and he created you, he loves you and he wants you to return to him. But you can’t hold onto your sin and still try and hold onto Christ.”
A yellow-vested Women’s March volunteer was arguing or reasoning or pleading with him in the tone one uses to try and talk sense into a recalcitrant child or a mental patient.
“I’m here preaching the love and the truth of the gospel,” Michael told her. “And I’m sorry if it offends you. I don’t want to offend you but I’m trying to give you the truth. This isn’t a political statement that we’re doing, we’re preaching the gospel. We go everywhere! We go to Trump rallies. Wherever the people are who need to hear the gospel, that’s where we go.”
“It’s not fair, it’s your opinion—” the volunteer interjected, but Michael was more voluble and quicker on his feet than redhead Jesus had been.
“This is the scripture, these aren’t my words! These are the words of Jesus Christ and if you don’t believe in his word, then—it’s between you and God!”
“No, honey—”
“No no no, I’m not the honey, please don’t say that!” He was also less meek and mild, more assertive, his delivery tinged with a consistent undertone of exasperation, like a Biblical prophet struggling to convince folks to stop fucking bowing down to idols, why is this so hard?
A woman in her sixties wearing a pink pussy hat—Samantha, let’s call her—approached and struck a confrontational pose, leaning forward, right hand raised and jabbing the air to emphasize her words. In her left she held a sign: “MIND YOUR OWN DAMN BUSINESS - HARRIS WALZ 2024.” She commenced to scream at Michael, her face contorted with rage. The endless rattle of a nearby noisemaker provided a harrowing soundtrack for the showdown.
“We’re here preaching Jesus Christ, we’re not here preaching Trump to you. We’re here preaching the love of God. Donald Trump’s not gonna save ya! Kamala Harris ain’t gonna save ya! No politician is gonna save your soul, I’m sorry, but that’s not the truth!”
Samantha screamed something I couldn’t fully make out, but I’m nearly certain I heard “. . . if you have a foreskin, you’re gonna . . .” before she was drowned out by the surrounding cacophony.
“Take your imperfect vessel Trump,” another woman snarled, “and go over there!”
“This isn’t a political message we’re giving you, we’re giving you the gospel—”
“I’m a Christian! You’re shit!”
“You’re not a Christian with a mouth like that!”
The noisemaker rattled on. Samantha continued to yell. Uli chose this moment to reappear. “You’re back? You’re back again?” He chanted at Michael, who hadn’t moved since I’d shown up. “You bag of shit, you bag of shit, you’re back? You’re back again?”
Michael and the foulmouthed Christian continued to duke it out. Uli, not reading the room, happily chanted into his bullhorn. “Pro-life is a lie, you don’t care if women die!” I noticed the legend on his bag for the first time: THANK GOD FOR ABORTION.
He repeated this four or five times until a nearby volunteer, clearly embarrassed by her uncouth ally, tried to usher him off the sidewalk into the plaza. “I’m pro-choice!” he assured her. “I’m for Kamala.” She smiled and nodded, looking uncomfortable.
“He came to set you free from sin. He came to set all men and women free from sin. And get their chains off, the chains of sin—”
“Yeah, fuck your Bible,” Uli said. “Fuck your shitty Bible, bitch. Fuck your shitty Bible, bitch. Fuck your shitty Bible, bitch. Fuck your shitty Bible, bitch.”
“Aww, he’s upset.” Michael softened. “We love you! We love you anyway. We love you anyway, that’s why we’re here to give you the truth.”
“Here’s Satan right here!” a woman shouted. “Here’s the devil, right here! There he is! It’s the devil, right here!” She held up a sign depicting a deranged-looking Trump topped with a knitted rainbow hat.
“Oh my God, fuck your Bible! Fuck your Bible! Fuck your shitty Bible!”
“Your sin will drag you to hell. You’re gonna have to choose your sin or you’re gonna have to choose Jesus Christ. But the choice is on you. You can choose, do you want to choose sin or do you want to choose Jesus? You can’t choose both.”
“You have!” Samantha screamed, reentering the ring for a second round. “You’re voting for Trump! You’re voting for a fascist!”
“Anyone who’s in Christ is a new creation—”
“Your candidate hates you! You’re not white!”
“Arise anew in Christ. He’s come to change you, he’s come to change your heart, he’s come to change your desires. That’s the power of Jesus Christ, to all those who believe on him.”
“No! Your candidate doesn’t give a shit about you!” She was on a roll.
“He’s come to set you free from things, he’s come to set you free from whatever you’re bound by, whatever sin that it is, he’s come to set you free from it.”
“Your candidate doesn’t liiike yooouu!” she taunted in that now familiar “nanny nanny boo boo” singsong.
“And that’s why we’re here. Because there’s nothing in the world that’s worth your soul. There’s no sin in this world that’s worth your soul. So if you are a Christian today—”
“He’s gonna do away with you!” Samantha hoisted her “MIND YOUR OWN DAMN BUSINESS” sign high. “Cuz your skin is brown! Vote for yourself!”
“—it says, ‘Let all those who name the name of Christ depart iniquity,’ meaning turn from sin, not have fellowship with it. Not be in lockstep with it.”
“He’s gonna gas you!”
“It says turn from sin, all those who name the name of Christ.”
“You have been gaslit by Trump!”
“If you don’t name the name of Christ, we’re here today for you to receive the gospel of Jesus Christ!”
“You have been gaslit by Trump!”
“Cuz Jesus is the truth.”
“He’s a fucking liar! He’s the fucking anti-Christ!”
“Obedience to Jesus is what it means to be a Christian. In his ways, in his doctrines, in what he said.”
“He is the anti-Christ!”
And then I realized: This is Twitter. I am standing in the middle of a live-action Twitter fight. The rage, the hysteria, the incomprehension, the bad faith, the spite, the vitriol—everything that’s awful about the most toxic corners of the internet was concentrated here like an evil spirit haunting a house, stripping away the veneer of sanity and civility with which we go about our daily lives, unmasking the delirious, gibbering rage and hate that we normally manage to conceal.
A passing young woman, both middle fingers raised high, eloquently summarized the general mood.
I stuck around a few minutes longer to document more civil discourse.
But the screaming, preaching, and mock retching sounds were starting to wear thin, and I decamped in the direction of the World War I memorial.
And that’s when I saw the blood. It had been dumped from buckets into the middle of 14th Street, and gathered in pools and streams that reflected the surrounding people, buildings, trees, and sky.
“Abortion is violence! Abortion is oppression!” a young man chanted.
A sign identified his posse as the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, an organization “committed,” per their website, “to the progressive feminist values of equality, non-violence, and nondiscrimination through an anti-capitalist lens.” Aside from abortion, their positions are so aggressively, blaringly leftwing that I can’t help wondering if they’re a conservative psyop. The site features a land acknowledgement and is riddled with KendiAngelonian social justice jargon. Their Instagram makes clear that they oppose the “genocide” in Gaza as much as the “genocide in the womb.”
A knot of sign-toting pro-choice protestors stood nearby but kept to themselves. As a woman walked past with a boom mic I understood why things were quieter here: a significant number of the people around me were journalists. They had also noticed the perfect mirror effect created by the declining late afternoon sun in the puddles of fake blood. Photographers with big expensive cameras kneeled by a large puddle to get a shot of the inverted bystanders captured in the shimmering red-dyed corn syrup.
The small PAAU contingent inspired a few half-hearted “We won’t go back”s, but the vibe here was markedly less enthused. Uli would probably show up sooner or later and fire things up, and honestly, I didn’t want to be there when he did.
“All fifty states protect access to life saving emergency medical care!” a PAAU kid assured the crowd, but nobody seemed to care. “Miscarriage care is not abortion! Ectopic pregnancy treatment is not abortion!”
As I reached the edge of the crowd I heard a man bellowing. “VOOOOOTE . . . VOTE DONALD TRUMP! VOTE DONALD TRUMP! VOOOOOTE . . .”
With his shorts and button-down shirt, his jaunty top knot, and his carefree afternoon drunkenness, he looked like an aging frat boy whose friends had all graduated and got jobs on Wall Street.
“VOOOOOTE . . .”
A couple approached, as amused as I was. The guy, a man in his thirties, chanted along:
“VOTE DONALD TRUMP! VOTE DONALD TRUMP!”
“That’s an anthem!” he said, and laughed heartily.
“Are you convinced?” I asked. “Has he got your vote?” I was joking, but also not. I was wondering if I’d met another of those black Trump voters I’d been hearing so much about.
But he was cagey about his views.
“I think you have to weigh your personal policies. Y’know, we all have personal policies. And whatever works for you, that works for you, and you just gotta hope that the party you vote for follows through. You know what I mean? But when you almost incite violence against someone because they have their opinion, almost be like them inciting violence against you for your opinion. You know what I mean? So you just gotta listen to them, if you don’t agree, that’s fine, but just go vote! If you wanna incite violence, use that energy to go vote, and if your party follows through then guess what? You won. I think it’s amazing that people come out here and are able to do this with so much passion. Look at this guy! This is passion right here.”
“‘Passion’ is one word,” I said drily, and he laughed again. I told him about the showdowns I’d witnessed between the proselytizers and the pussy hats, about the anger and downright childishness.
“Yeah, anger’s not passion. Cuz no matter what, they wake up and they have their thought just like that person wakes up and they have their thought. You know what I mean? So it’s never personal. This guy, he doesn’t look at anybody who opposes him as if it’s personal, he’s passionate—look at him! Look at this guy!” He laughed. “Look, that’s an anthem! See? Why do you have to call people names? Like, ‘he’s stupid.’ But again, we all have personal policies—vote for your personal policy. And no one is dumber because they disagree with you, because you’re not dumber cuz you disagree with them.”
“I agree with that,” I told him.
It was the most sensible thing I’d heard all day.
More signs:
Another meaningless term, in this case used to mean pro-Russia, pro-China, pro-Iran.
And they wonder why they lost ...
Alternate title: Woman's March Madness.
Thanks for reporting on this absolute insanity, Benjy. You've a stronger constitution than me.