A weekend protest draws thousands to decry the presidential administration—and perhaps marks an inflection point.

David Schmalz here. Things aren’t great in America right now, to put it lightly, but if you, like me, were out at one of the nationwide Hands Off protests on Saturday, April 5, you may have come away with some modicum of hope. 

On top of the hundreds of protesters that gathered in Salinas that day, well over a thousand people lined the sidewalk and stood on the grass at Monterey’s Window on the Bay, where for two hours protesters held signs and chanted slogans as the procession of cars streaming past on Del Monte Avenue honked in a show of solidarity. 

Some of the signs had humorous messages—“IKEA has better cabinets,” “Ugh, where do I even start”—while others went for the profound, like Martin Luther King Jr.’s quote, “To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it,” or Margaret Mead’s, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”

The nonstop honking and chanting punctuated the affair with a discordant, raucous vibe, one that sounded a lot like what the late congressman John Lewis might have called “good trouble.” 

A handful of elected officials gave short, rousing speeches, including County Supervisor Kate Daniels, who repeatedly invoked the chant, “This is what democracy looks like!” 

She mentioned last week’s Supreme Court race in Wisconsin, where the Democratic candidate boat-raced a Republican candidate whose campaign was bolstered—though arguably tanked—by $25 million from Elon Musk. She mentioned New Jersey Senator Cory Booker’s inspiring, record-breaking filibuster in protest of Trump’s policies. “This was a big week for democracy,” Daniels said.

But the point she brought up that resonated with me most was, “The thing that’s so important about the Hands Off rally that’s happening all around the nation, is that it’s nonviolent.”

And indeed, I didn’t pick up even a whiff of menace from the protesters at Window on the Bay, but rather, a sense of renewed solidarity to peacefully resist, in every way possible, the dark and fascistic turn the federal government has taken in Trump’s second term. Nor did I see reports of violence at any other Hands Off protests across the country.

It was probably no coincidence then that yesterday, via social media, I came across a 2019 article about the work of Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth, who studied campaigns of civil resistance and social movements worldwide from 1900 to 2006, and found that nonviolent campaigns were twice as effective as those that involved violence, which included harm to people or property. 

Moreover, Chenoweth found that success was all but assured once a campaign, during a peak event, had at least 3.5 percent of the citizens participating, which she coined the “3.5-percent rule.” 

I don’t think the Hands Off events neared that threshold on April 5, but it was a start, and as I rode my bike away from Window on the Bay toward the Monterey Museum of Art’s block party in downtown, it felt to me like the event was an inflection point.

Others, apparently, felt the same, and in an April 7 statement from the Indivisible Project—a movement that started in the wake of Trump’s election in 2016—co-executive director Leah Greenberg said, “When we look back on the fight against the American fascist movement, people will talk about this as an inflection point.”

Where exactly the resistance will lead no one yet knows, but on the local level, it has come alive, and the antibodies have assembled.