May Day: The Revolution Hits the Streets

Jesse Jackson made his comeback; revolution is all the rage.

May 1, also known as May Day or International Labor Day, beckoned thousands of workers across America to turn out against the Trump administration and what activists denounced as the president’s anti-working-class agenda. Diverse crowds from Chicago to L.A. blazoned their support for causes as miscellaneous as socialism and trans rights, immigration and abortion — all under the guise of protesting Trump.

Six months ago, in the lead-up to the presidential election, I spoke to voters at several political events in Arizona about whether the federal government had too much power. So when I learned that one of the organizers behind an event I had previously attended was hosting a “march in resistance to the ongoing assaults from an extreme right-wing federal administration,” I knew it was time to hit the streets again.

I arrived expecting a spectacle. What I witnessed more than exceeded my expectations.

The event started at a church, where I encountered a sea of protestors, many of whom were armed with profane, anti-Trump protest signs, which seemed more than a bit out of place in the shadow of a church. (I later looked the church up and discovered that it prominently supports “social justice”; it also features a puppy named Charlie on its church staff page.) 

But before I could read a single sign, the first thing I noticed was a massive flag bearing not red, white, and blue but red, black, white, and green. The former flag, I quickly noticed, was in short supply at this event. The latter abounded. 


Ostensibly, the crowd rallied against Trump. But the preponderance of Palestinian flags, anti-police slogans, and messages about “liberation” betrayed a deeper agenda: what the crowd really wanted was Revolution.

The multitude began marching through the streets. Scattered throughout the procession, various members carried bullhorns and led their comrades in chants of opposition. Elsewhere, a band played as a woman wearing a dress decorated with the Palestinian flag, the transgender flag, and the Progress Pride flag danced enthusiastically. Yet another group carried a Bluetooth speaker, which proudly roared, “Fight the power! We’ve got to fight the power.”

This ambiguous war cry summarized the overall disposition of the crowd; while the protestors were clearly discontented and angry, their dissatisfaction was directed at something more fundamental than the current administration. Ultimately, it was targeted at “the system,” Western, democratic society as a whole, which, according to one dissenter, was a racist, sexist system.

What was striking to me was the extent to which that struggle was inextricably linked with the “Palestinian cause.” One man I spoke to condemned the president for his “unconditional support for Israel” and told me that his group, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, “unequivocally demand[s] justice for Palestine.” Someone else told me that while she accepts Judaism as a “beautiful religion,” she also believes that “Israel is the nation-state of the Zionist entity, and Zionism … has become really violent and oppressive.” 

A third individual, when I asked what his message to President Trump would be, simply replied, “Woooo, [expletive] that dude.” He wasn’t the only one who gave me such an answer. But when I pressed him about what specifically he disliked about Trump, he struggled to come up with anything. “In the end,” he finally responded, “Trump is such a vile human being, but the United States’ policy, Democrats or Republicans, the system itself is aligned with colonialism and the genocide of the Palestinian people.”

There it was: the word that underlay much of the popular discontent I was seeing: colonialism. I also heard talk about “climate justice.” It seemed to me that these people, in true “intersectional” fashion, were willing to rope together any cause that smelled of oppression. But between chants of “free, free, free Palestine” and the march being led by a man whose hat and banner said “from the river to the sea,” it was clear that more than a year and a half after October 7, the pro-Palestinian movement in America was still a fashionable cause.

Amazingly, it even overshadowed the LGBTQ+ presence at the march. In fact, I spotted more Palestinian flags than Pride flags. That’s not to say the transgender community had no presence at the event. (One individual carried a sign that said, “Let me and my friends inject hormones.”) It was just more muted than I would have expected.


But while sexual issues may have taken a backseat on May Day, disgust for the richest man in the world, the head of DOGE, certainly did not. For a group of people who generally seemed to view the world through an oppressor-v-oppressed lens (one man told me that Trump was trying to make the rich richer and the poor poorer), Elon Musk’s partnership with Trump was an unmitigated disaster area. How exactly was anyone supposed to explain away two white male billionaires working together in the White House to this crowd, some of whom openly called for the destruction of the billionaire class?

“The answer is to abolish this greedy, parasitic, and profoundly dangerous class of billionaires once and for all!” A volunteer for the Tucson Global Justice Center handed me a flyer that felt calculated to trigger a Bolshevik uprising. Borrowing from the ethics of Marx, Lenin, and Robin Hood, the pamphlet accused the rich of poisoning “our society with racism and all other sorts of divisive hate” and “threatening human life in profound ways by constantly starting wars and deepening the climate crisis.”

“We can abolish the billionaire class by seizing their wealth and the corporations they own and turning it into public property to be used for the benefit of everyone,” the flyer concluded.

How many of their fellow protestors would have supported these openly socialist aims? It’s hard to say. However, given the numerous signs condemning the wealthy and one demonstrator dressed in a trash can labeled “billionaire trash,” they evidently came to the right place for a receptive audience. 


Watching local news coverage of the event later that night, I heard one lady say that the protest gave her hope. Quite the opposite for me. I walked away feeling discouraged and concerned for the future of the nation.

As I drove home, I asked myself, what set this event apart from others I had visited? The answer was obvious. Whereas crowds at other events chanted “USA,” this group shouted “No ICE, no police,” “No more missiles, no more bombs,” and “Unite and fight for immigrant rights.” I had not heard a single pro-American slogan, and when I returned home, I couldn’t even remember if I had seen an American flag (I later confirmed from reviewing my footage that there had been a few, but they certainly weren’t prevalent).

It all begs the question: How can we proceed as a nation when we’re torn between two disparate factions? When roughly one-half of the population believes that America is the greatest country in the world, and the other half believes that the system is systemically corrupted and must fall? 

President Trump wants us to believe that “America is back.” But after spending time amongst the opposition, it’s apparent to me that Americanism is still floundering. We have a long way to go if we hope to change the hearts and minds of the American people and reconcile this politics-weary nation. 

But, for now, if there’s anything we can agree on, it’s that the federal government has too much power.

Speaking to voters before the election, when Joe Biden was still president, I noticed that, while both sides usually admitted that Washington was overly powerful, left-leaning voters were often more ambivalent about the question than right-leaning folks. But after all the signs I saw yesterday comparing the president to a king (or a Nazi), I’m sure they’ve changed their minds.

Regardless of your views about the administration, shrinking the federal government would be beneficial for everyone. We shouldn’t have to live in constant fear about what executive order the president might issue next or whether an unelected judge will thwart his agenda. By limiting the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, we can diffuse a hostile situation and ensure that genuine tyranny is never allowed to rise in America.

Article V of the U.S. Constitution enables us to do exactly that. Sign the petition below to show your support, or visit conventionofstates.com to learn more.