Today, every Republican senator aside from Mitt Romney decided that Trump either didn’t solicit foreign interference in the upcoming election, to the detriment of the national interest, and for his personal benefit, or that he did, but should be allowed to remain in office anyway. I could not abide this body blow to democracy without trying to do something, and so I did what I am thankfully still allowed to do (though if Trumpism ultimately prevails, I might not be): register my discontent in a public political protest that demanded that Trump be removed from power.
The protest itself was pretty sad – only five of us showed up, in the rain, to the courthouse where the protest was held – but I was glad to have gone. For one, it gave me some fodder for this essay. For another, it was a fitting act, given that, both before and after my feeble attempt to protect American democracy from Trump, I had been engaged in equally feeble, albeit somewhat more interesting attempts to advance democracy in China. In the hour or so leading up to the five-person protest, I’d been messaging with a Chinese student at Johns Hopkins who’d started a petition against an event featuring Joshua Wong and Nathan Law, two prominent figures in Hong Kong’s efforts to protect and expand what remains of their democracy in the face of Chinese Communist Party encroachment. I’ve long been interested in the irony of students from China taking advantage of rights and freedoms neither they nor their counterparts in China – that is, non-Chinese students studying in China – to advocate for their political beliefs and positions. In this case, that belief was, according to my interlocutor, that Wong and Law were not really pro-democracy activists, and should not be celebrated. Instead, she maintained, they were “bad people” whose attempts to seek American help for their efforts were as “treasonous” as Trump’s attempts to seek Ukrainian help in the upcoming election, and who had caused “violence,” “vandalism,” and “racism” in Hong Kong. Her plea to Johns Hopkins, where she was a student, was that the event be canceled. I asked if she’d be satisfied if Johns Hopkins offered her and her fellow petitioners a chance to debate Wong and Law, and she said yes. I advised her that she should make that, instead of cancelation, her demand, and I also tried, through gentle questioning, to get her to see the irony of her actions. But before I could get a sense of whether either of my efforts had worked, I had to cut our conversation short to go to the ill-fated anti-Trump protest.
On my way home from the protest, I had a phone call with a person I’d been dying to talk to for weeks. All I really knew about him was that he was somehow connected to the paid “protests” in support of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou at her extradition hearing in Vancouver, British Columbia. As it turns out, his involvement was limited to giving out contact information for people who might be interested in making some quick cash as extras on what he thought was a TV or film production. Far more interesting was that the person who’d reached out to him for help finding extras was a woman from China he’d met on a prior, legitimate, production (but whom he didn’t know well). He couldn’t say who she was working for, but he was pretty mad that he’d been misled, because one of the people whose phone numbers he’d passed on – and who’d thus been duped into playing the part of Meng Wanzhou supporter – was his own son! Thank goodness, he told me, he’d been wearing a hoodie when the CCTV cameras were rolling. Otherwise, his face would have been all over the news in China – the only place where the “protestors” were presented as actual, genuine protestors, instead of paid actors – as well as in Canada – where the actor-protestors were being variously mocked and attacked (unfairly, I think, in light of the facts) for being CCP stooges.
Well, there you have it. Democracy – or at least, the efforts of one democrat – in action. Who knows what tomorrow will bring. In the meantime, here’s a blurry picture of me and four other lovers of democracy, on a rainy night in Norfolk, Virginia.
