Don't let MAGA turn 'No Kings' march into a 'Hate America' rally

Andrea Grossman was a kid when her mother pulled her out of school to join the 1969 Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, a nationwide day of peaceful protest.

- ANITA CHABRIA COLUMNIST

PROTESTERS march during a “No Kings” event in downtown L.A. on June 14.

They held hands while her mom walked in a knit suit and ladylike shoes, joining more than 2 million people nationwide.

Grossman, now one of the organizers of the Beverly Hills segment of the “No Kings” marches being held in more than 2,000 cities this weekend, remembers that opponents of that long-ago protest threw stinky rat poison on the lawns in Exposition Park so participants couldn't sit on the grass.

But protesters were not deterred.

"It made it all the more rebellious of us to be there," Grossman told me. "It made us more insistent that we had to be there." Today, that rat poison is being metaphorically hurled by MAGA leaders such as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), in the form of noxious allegations that the No Kings marches are "Hate America" rallies staged for a "rabid base" of criminal agitators.

"It's all the pro-Hamas wing and the antifa people, they're all coming out," Johnson said on Fox News.

Of course, that is dumb and false. It would be all too easy to write off comments such as Johnson's as partisan jibber-jabber, but his insidious words are the kind of poison that seeps into the soil and shouldn't be ignored.

The 'enemy within'

Johnson isn't the only Republican working overtime to smear everyday folks such as Grossman.

Talk about organized camTrumpites are all paigns going after No Kings with the same script.