Maga is painting Saturday’s protests as violent treason. Prove them wrong | Judith Levine

“They have a ‘Hate America’ rally that’s scheduled for October 18 on the National Mall,” the House speaker, Mike Johnson, said on Fox News on Friday. “It’s all the pro-Hamas wing and, you know, the antifa people. They’re all coming out.”

The Republican Minnesota congressman Tom Emmer said the party’s “terrorist wing” was holding the “Hate America” rally. “Democrats want to keep the government shut down to show all those people that are going to come here and express their hatred towards this country that they’re fighting President Trump,” said the House majority leader, Steve Scalise. The transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, embellished the story on Fox, referring to the demonstrations’ “paid protesters” and adding: “It begs the question who’s funding it.”

These people are, of course, slandering the second round of No Kings marches, following those on 14 June, which dwarfed Trump’s pitiful birthday party military parade. This time the events – more than 2,500 of them, according to organizers, planned for every state – promise to be even larger.

Trump’s allies are trying to overwrite the patriotic, historically resonant words “No Kings” with insinuations of treasonous violence.

Everyone participating in the protests must prove them wrong. Nonviolence, both rigorously disciplined and open-hearted, must define 18 October.

The stakes are bigger than anything that happens tomorrow. Because these politicians are not just talking. This smear campaign is one skirmish in the all-fronts war on a vaguely defined leftwing entity the administration calls “antifa”. This war – declared in the 25 September national security presidential memorandum, Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence – is not just supported by propaganda. Disinformation is its essence.

The national security reporter Ken Klippenstein published a restricted-circulation FBI/homeland security bulletin on “domestic violence extremists” (DVE), released on 1 October, that links attacks on Ice buildings to peaceful anti-Ice demonstrations. Since June, it says, “small groups of threat actors, some of whom are DVEs, have leveraged large, lawful protests” in California and Oregon “to engage in violent activity” against Ice facilities and “violent confrontations with law enforcement”.

Last week, at a White House “antifa roundtable”, the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, claimed: “Antifa is just as sophisticated as MS-13, as [Tren de Aragua], as Isis, as Hezbollah, as Hamas, as all of them.” The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, thanked the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, “for getting to the bottom of these funding mechanisms and individuals who are perpetuating this violence on our American cities”.

Commentators on the “Hate America” blitz, including some of the events’ organizers, have called it an attempt to silence dissent by scaring would-be marchers into staying home. My hunch is that diminishing the crowds is just half of the strategy. The other half is more pernicious. With Ice and the military already dispatched to terrorize Black and blue cities, such language may inspire civilian paramilitaries – many of them armed, organized and trained – to go into the streets and cause mayhem.

These militias took action on 6 January 2021. They are itching for another opportunity to attack the “enemy within”, and they don’t need explicit orders to do so. “Hate America” is the phrase that could impel them to act.

In larger cities like New York and San Francisco, the marchers will far outnumber any counter-protesters. In the cities occupied by federal troops, where local police don’t relish the optics of teargas wafting through crowds of elderly baby boomers and babies in strollers, there’s no guarantee the feds will restrain themselves. The national guard and Ice have already gassed and pepper-sprayed demonstrators apparently doing nothing more aggressive than standing around and yelling, or, like the Chicago pastor shot in the head with a pepper ball canister, nothing aggressive at all.

Enter the freelance enforcers. And it’s in the red states, where gun laws are lax and progressives constitute a small minority, that the odds of aggression and goading to aggression by Maga loyalists are highest.

Maga wants nothing more than violence at the marches. Any violent clash, no matter who starts it, will be a green light to the administration to step up the policing crackdown, including on Saturday. The White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, has been tossing around the word “insurrection” to describe peaceful opposition to the Trump agenda. The president could use anything construable as chaos to invoke the Insurrection Act.

Nonviolence is not the same as passivity; it’s the antithesis of surrender. It is not mild, not even friendly. Contradictory as it sounds, steadfast nonviolent resistance against a violent state is the most righteous expression of rage.

It’s reassuring that the national non-profit Indivisible, which is also reportedly in Trump’s sights, is among the groups at the helm of the No Kings events. Since its founding in 2016, the organization has been committed to nonviolence. “We reject all forms of political violence and intimidation, no matter the source or the target,” reads its website. “That’s not just a moral stance – it’s a strategic one. Movements that create lasting change do so by building trust, forging solidarity and demonstrating discipline, even in the face of threats or attacks.”

Almost all of the 250 partner organizations that appear on NoKings.org are as politically vanilla as progressives can get: the ACLU, Faithful America, the Sierra Club, the Feminist Majority.

Alert to the administration’s provocations, Indivisible provides detailed information on running legal, safe and peaceful events. “We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values,” it says. Weapons of any kind are always prohibited.

The good news is that nonviolence is the 21st-century US left’s default behavior. With few exceptions, it is not just nonviolent; it is anti-violence. Prison abolition, disarmament, the feminist politics of care, pacifism – these are leftwing movements. By contrast, extreme-right causes, institutions and tropes – gun rights, the carceral state, the “warrior ethos” – spell out a politics of coercion, cruelty and punishment.

On 18 October, tens of millions of people in the streets, peacefully exercising the democratic rights that the Trump regime is laboring to eliminate, will give the lie to Maga’s hallucinatory network of bomb-throwing traitors. No Kings will show America who the real haters are.

• Judith Levine is a Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism