I’ve never been to a rally full of Democrats that felt like hope. Even No Kings Day felt like a form of controlled opposition driving us to be more passive in our acceptance of fate. Saturday, October 4, in Downtown Alton felt different, though. The Riverbend Unity March truly lived up to its name.
A great friend named Galebert greeted me. He donned a trans flag like a cape with the words “Make Fascists Afraid Again.” His shirt featured an M4 rifle with the blue, pink, and white stripes of the trans flag. “If this offends you, I’ll help you pack,” it read. It was an obvious parody of right-wing merchandise seen worn by slabs of stolen valor, cheap cigarettes, and a level of alcoholic misanthropy not even known by a ‘50s traveling salesman high on quaaludes and bastard children. You know the ones — trucks taller than their father’s shadow, spitting on the pavement. They smirk with a face only the softness of lead could create.
They were gathered today as well — approximately 10 deep — at Lincoln-Douglas Square before the Riverbend Unity March today. Folks who planned a “Love March” to honor slain right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk garnered a lot of hype among local political junkies. However, that hype — like all hype for Mr. Kirk across the board — fizzled with time and the attention span of modern Americans.
The APD were on the scene for the Riverbend Unity March, at a distance. They were there to observe and be able to step in if needed. As was expected by all parties, they were not needed. Neither the Love March nor the Unity March had violent intentions. Despite our beef with their messaging, and because we don’t want to delve too philosophically into what violence means when free speech has consequences, we believe the Charlie Kirk crowd was intending to be peaceful, albeit a bit antagonistic.
There, now I got the questions most people DMed me about today out of the way. I want to personally apologize for generating so much hype around Charlie Kirk stuff. Like everyone who is terminally online and locked into the political battleground of the United States, I get caught in the toxic zeitgeist. The news is my special interest, and I will — for better or worse — always be the media.
Now, to the shit that actually matters.
For the first time in my professional career as a journalist, I met politicians who inspired me. Local candidates like Kyle Nudo, who is working to run against Mary Miller, the Trump sycophant representing much of our leadership in the halls of Congress in Washington, D.C., were joined by the Chicago-based Jump Shepherd, who is hoping to run for the seat being vacated by the retiring Dick Durbin.
Kudos to rally hosts Alton People’s United for hosting the event and getting such great speakers to elevate the experience! They did a great job organizing, planning, preparing for safety, and ensuring rallygoers were great stewards of our community.
The event opened with an inclusive prayer for the overall well-being of our community and nation led by Rosetta Brown. Brown is almost finished collecting enough signatures to get on the ballot to run as a Democrat against Republican incumbent Amy Elik.
She began her speech by thanking Alton People’s United for keeping the event safe and organized through a volunteer safety team. She led a chant of “Each one teach one,” and even commanded those assembled to look to their neighbor and teach them something quickly. But, her overall message was the need for unity within a community.
Her vision of unity, she said, involved shared human values. She said everyone wants children to make it safely to and from school. She said families deserve clean water and food. She said those values and those like them are larger than any division created in a community.
The largest value she touted was that of education as an expansive concept. She challenged the audience to think beyond the idea of education as purely pencils, desks, and textbooks. She said passing family wisdom is education. Mentorship is education. She said education was everywhere. Brown also made a special point of highlighting the need for financial literacy in the community.
She challenged the audience to dedicate one hour a week to mentoring, one to teach a skill, and one to champion a small local busines. We also challenge our audience to do the same. We will even give you bonus points for intergenerational wisdom passing back and forth from young to old and old to young. She’d probably like that.
The next speaker was someone I’ve seen around the internet in my scary PROGRESSIVE and ANTI-FASCIST circles. His name is Jump Shepherd. That’s not a typo. Every time someone asked him his name for the second time, he did an actual jump with a large smile. He is running a grassroots campaign to fill the giant vacancy being left by Dick Durbin’s retirement. Love him or hate him, Durbin was a powerful political force. It will take a lot to fill that seat.
Jump Shepherd could do it. As we were watching the other speakers, he was getting word of an ICE-involved shooting of a woman they claimed was armed. When the person showing us disclosed the location of the shooting, Jump’s face changed. With a look of genuine human concern, he told the person “that’s close to where I stay. I hope they’re ok.” That sounds like how most people would react, but I’ve met senators. Not many would even be able to fake the level of empathy that comes naturally to him.
He came all the way to Alton to address a crowd of around 150 people (official count is 161). He’s a blue-collar young black man who is in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Like Brown, he championed education, including access to trade schools as well as liberal arts and apprenticeship programs. One issue folks have against modern liberalism is an elitist hierarchy of academia over trade schools. Jump Shepherd subverted those expectations.
“Politics is not complicated,” he told the crowd. He reduced the ages-long human concept of power and collective good into three questions. Where do we come from? Where are we today? Where do we want to go? He criticized the United States for being the wealthiest nation in the history of the world and allowing billionaires to have too much control. He promised that would change.
Inequality played a large role in his messaging Saturday afternoon. He spoke on the massive wealth inequality happening in this nation. It’s the largest it’s ever been. One person holds more wealth than 53% of the population, he said. This was quoted by Bernie Sanders referencing Elon Musk. When fact-checking, a 2022 World Inequality Report stated the richest 10% of the global population takes 52% of the global income. Inequality is a global issue.
“It’s bullshit,” he said.
He said six media conglomerates control the things most Americans get to see on the news. He said that our establishment should breed outrage. Americans are often not shown how other nations deal with such issues as education, healthcare, and housing. They are often not shown things that would affect the lives of everyday blue-collar laborers.
Shepherd then lambasted the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision, which allowed political action committees (PACs) to be middle entities between the rich and the politicians they buy. Elon Musk’s outlandish $270 million donation to two super PACs that promoted Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy is a perfect example of Citizen’s United in action. No one from either political party should feel safe with one person they have never met having that much power over the future of our nation and children.
He added that Donald Trump’s regime is the most dangerous we have ever seen. The donation from Musk allowed the eccentric weirdo billionaire to have control over government spending and our personal and private records with a team of man-children featuring a man named Big Balls whose beatdown by actual children unleashed a fascist military takeover of Washington, D.C. Eventually that fizzled into probation levels of community service being done by our brave troops who are more needed elsewhere or should be at home with their families awaiting actual need. He sent them armed with guns known for accidental discharges as they went through residential areas with a vulgar display of force.
Now, Trump is threatening to federalize the Illinois National Guard, as he needlessly did in L.A. earlier this year. Shepherd lamented the way his community is being ravaged by ICE, who descended from a military helicopter, arrested an entire housing unit, including American citizens and children indiscriminately.
He said that health care is broken and as many as 85 million Americans are at least underinsured. A recent poll has discovered approximately 37% of American adults cannot afford a procedure or care due to medical and dental costs.
His address ended with a message of hope for the future — a rare commodity these days. He wanted to live in an America who was showing other nations how we achieved that level of education, healthcare, and housing. He wanted our nation to be the envy of the world for the right reasons — not for the violence we can project — but for the way we can serve our own needs, the needs of each other, and the needs of community through a collective democracy based in common sense and good will.
I liked his speech so much, I have petitions y’all can sign if you want to. Send requests to sunkenpresspodcast@gmail.com. We can hook it up. We need more blue-collar electricians with empathy in Congress.
Local man Kyle Nudo made a speech regarding his intent to one day defeat Mary Miller, a shame of Illinois the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Phyllis Schlafly. Like Schlafly, Nudo grew up in Alton. Unlike Schlafly, Nudo climbed the bluffs and did BMX bike shit (SAVE THE STATE STREET TRAILS).
Nudo spoke on patriotism and community, citing his mother’s decades of service with folks with disabilities. He started the chant “Unity! Power!” and “Courage! Power!” He said patriotism is the courage to defy the government when it tells you anti-capitalist sentiment and anti-Christian sentiments could label someone as a domestic terrorist under the Trump regime. He said that America was founded on such defiant courageous patriotism. He told the crowd we have been demoralized as a nation since 2016.
He’s not wrong.
He then demanded the crowd not allow the tyrannical powers that be take their patriotism or courage. When he described dissent as a crime now, a member of the crowded shouted a heroic “Fuck that!”
“Fuck that indeed,” Nudo replied with a grin. “Deny the bully,” he continued, “courage is contagious.”
The final speaker was Jaimie Hileman the director of Trans Education Service. She described her resume including roles as a former corporate executive, small business hire, and a DEI professional as a trans woman as one of the most inclined to disrespect by the Trump Administration.
She dropped some devastating facts to the audience. Nearly 1,000 bills have been proposed against trans people in the United States. Of those, 122 have passed. Wages stagnate, veterans go homeless, grocery prices rise, but 10% of bills only written to keep trans folks from living as they deem fit pass.
I was astonished when she claimed 60% of Americans have never met a trans person. I was hanging out with about a dozen of them at a clothing swap on a farm Saturday night. I looked it up. She was underselling it. Queer media monitoring organization GLAAD said their polling revealed 71% of Americans have never met a trans person. I’m pretty sure 71% of the people at my wedding were some form of genderqueer.
Those 71% of people are kept ignorant and afraid by a massive and well-funded propaganda campaign dedicated to radicalizing the average American into an unfair and uninformed worldview based on lies told by people who are paid more than their family will ever see in ten generations.
Hileman blatantly pointed out how many hungry children could be fed with the money spent on helping people villainize and dehumanize people they have never met. In 2023, 13.5% of U.S. households faced food insecurity at some point during the year. This was higher than the 12.8% reporting food insecurity that previous year. Children are starving in increasing numbers, but 10% of laws written explicitly against the existence of trans people pass.
“They say transgender people aren’t real; that it’s a choice, a fad, a trend,” she said. “They don’t see us as people but as a pathology. We are real. I am real. I have a real mortgage to pay.”
She said she also has to worry about her healthcare expenses and that she views planning for retirement as a cruel joke as her savings continue to shrink. It’s a feeling I know all too well. (If you have read this far, you should buy a subscription).
“Trickle down has trickled out,” she said.
Like the other speakers, she assured the group that the divisions in our nation could be overcome and the folks in the bottom vastly outnumber the worst machinations of the billionaires running this nation more and more as we descend deeper into fascism.
I hope they’re right.
Seeing an entire first generation of Pokemon worth of folks greater than the “Circle Kirk” at the Riverbend Unity March was inspiring. Feeling patriotic with my neighbors was great. America can be great again, but not under the fist of MAGA. Instead, we will rebuild side-by-side and brick-by-fucking-brick. Our labors will build value in ourselves, our neighbors, and our community. We, and the rest of the world, will see the nation we build from the tragedies of this regime as a beacon of compassion and good governance to the rest of the world. I just hope I get to live to see it.
A better world is possible. Today showed me that.
My apologies for the long read. I want to do longform content like this sometimes. Something feels right about this dropping on a Sunday. It felt like a description of sermons at a revival. It reminds me of the thickness of a Sunday newspaper while eating lunch at my grandmother’s house. I hope you enjoyed coffee and a pastry as you read this and got to relax a bit. Sorry for the extra screen time. I love you.
We put together a quick video of the march so you can see all the awesome signs!
A correction: Jaimie Hileman is executive director of Trans Education Service. She had a historical role with MTUG but is no longer with them. Her website is https://www.transedservice.com/