Baltimore’s was not the biggest of Saturday’s “No Kings” events; I’d say we had north of twelve hundred, but I couldn’t say how far north. (Update: The Baltimore Banner says 2,500+. They have a Pulitzer, so I say go with them.)

But it was pleasant, even bucolic. It was in Patterson Park, our big Olmstead-blessed greensward, and we sat on the downslope of the pagoda that they call the Observatory, on blankets or just on the cool grass (temps hit 90, overcast), and sighed whenever a cool breeze came through. Others sought the shade of trees on the periphery. Food trucks did a brisk business.

The Indivisible people gave a program similar to the one they ran last April for the national HandsOff demos. They started with rah-rah and the old what-democracy-looks-like chant, followed by old folkies playing old folky favorites. Not sure what “Tequila Sunrise” was doing in there, but I was chuffed to hear “All You Fascists Bound To Lose.” In fact I was chuffed to hear fascists mentioned so often on the program, and properly attributed. No one had to tell this largely middle-class crowd to behave themselves, but they were also not soft-soaping the clear and present danger.

A big moment was the appearance of Senator Chris Van Hollen. He’s an OK speaker, not much more than that. Like all the other speakers he was on the side of right. But there was more to it. Everyone there knew that Van Hollen was the guy who went to see about Kilmar Garcia in El Salvador, because the man was his constituent and had his rights violated and that’s part of an elected representative’s job, not to mention a good way to make a point about self-government and justice that a lot of people were unaccountably missing at the time.

And they really were missing it. Van Hollen’s insistence on Garcia’s rights got him laughed off by MAGA creeps and their Prestige Press enablers, and told by ICE Barbie that Garcia would never come back to the United States. But he kept at it anyway, and got the dictator (not that one, the other one) to let him see his constituent, and got courts to back him up, and finally got the Trumpkins to fetch Garcia back to the states for the due process he should have had all along.

Like Terry Southern said: Little man whip a big man every time if the little man’s in the right and keeps a’comin. On Saturday the crowd got on their feet when Van Hollen came onstage like he was Abe Lincoln and Cal Ripken Jr. combined. As one of the other speakers said: Isn’t it great when you hear a politician’s name and want to cheer? It sure is, and it’s also great that even some of the dumber Democrats seem to be catching on.

I’ve heard conflicting reports of total attendance for the hundreds of rallies nationwide on Saturday — some say five million, some say 11 million. (The Prestige Press says “thousands,” natch.) Certainly it was in the millions — hell, Boston’s rally alone drew one million. (Come on, MAGA, argue that they were really there for Pride!)

And the photographs suggest most major cities got close to that, and others in the tens of thousands. If so, since most of the attendees have friends (“Friends Everywhere” as the Andor-inspired signs say), that would mean many millions of people at least know someone who attended. And that’s true even in red zones like Phoenix and Coeur d'Alene.

Tubby and his mob want it ignored or forgotten, as do the Prestige Press. Hell, they’re even trying to tell us the Christian nationalist who shot two Democratic Minnesota legislators last weekend — thereby raising the salience of the protests — is actually a liberal. As usual, they’re trying with their lie diffusers to bamboozle Americans and lure them into a malignant fantasy world, telling them their real friends are the ones who are making everything worse for them, and that the ones throwing them lifelines are really a lynch mob.

Well, why wouldn’t they try it? It’s worked before. But even in this sad, sick world of ours, there do come moments where the bullshit gets so thick and heavy that even the dimmest low-information voter can smell it — and it only takes one stout soul to yell “hey, this is bullshit” to get them to admit it. As much as we marvel at how much wreckage Tubby has managed in a short amount of time (and it’s true!), it’s also marvelous how quickly and obviously he got so many Americans to tell him to fuck off. It’s not just lies that can be spread, after all, and we may yet dare hope that Woody was right and them fascists are not just losing but are, in fact, bound to lose.