OCEAN CITY — The crowd at Saturday’s No Kings Shorewide Resistance Rally in Ocean City wasn’t as big as organizers hoped, but the anti-Trump and anti-war passions on display were as fervent as during past rallies.
Moved to the Transportation Center parking lot because of construction at the corner of Bay Avenue and Ninth Street, sign-carrying protesters, bundled up against the morning’s chill and strong winds, cheered along to speeches dominated by political candidates.
Bayly Winder, Zack Mullock and Tim Alexander, three of the four running in the Democratic primary to have the chance to unseat U.S. Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-2nd, offered fiery speeches at the rally that began shortly after 10 a.m. The crowd also heard from County Commission candidate David Temple and Pat Pierce, president of Cape May Immigrant Support.
After the speeches, the protesters lined the sidewalk along Ninth Street and the walkway along the Route 52 causeway to wave signs and seek support in the form of honking horns from passing motorists.
Louis Stricoff of Indivisible Ocean City, the organizer of the rallies and protests in the resort over the past year, emphasized the peaceful nature of the gathering. In a spiritual opening prayer, he said, “I pray for our country. I pray for all of you, who are the patriots, the true patriots of our country right now, We are doing unbelievable work. We’re having a lot of success.”
Stricoff told those gathered to consider themselves like George Washington’s soldiers.
“We’re risking our lives, our reputations and our fortunes by coming out today,” he said. “Our movement is growing. There’s over 3,250 events (like this) across the United States and the world.”
Indivisible Ocean City coordinated the protests so those gathered could go to others in Cape May Court House, Galloway Township and Atlantic City later in the day.
Hoping to see things get back to the way they were before the Trump administration took over, Stricoff said things weren’t perfect then either.
“Our country’s not perfect by any means, but it was a lot better than this insane maniac we have in there,” he said, referring to President Donald Trump.
Van Drew wasn’t at the rally, at least in person, but Winder carried an almost-life-size cardboard cutout of the congressman and held it while he spoke to the crowd.
“This is the time to stand up for basic decency for the American values that we all treasure, whether it is abuses by ICE, whether it’s the corruption of Citizens United, whether it is the fact that this administration thinks foreign policy is about transactions to line their wallets, we need to do better,” Winder said. “And Jeff Van Drew is exactly what is wrong with Congress today. This is the year to get him out. He is running scared. He does not show up because he’s afraid of an honest conversation. We are not afraid of that conversation.”
Winder said changes can’t wait on term limits, ending tariffs or reintroducing checks and balances in Washington.
“We do not get there with business-as-usual politics. We need to do better as a Democratic Party. We need to fight, meet this moment and make it clear that this cannot be the same old playbook,” he said.
Mullock, mayor of Cape May, said no president should have the power by himself to drag a country into a war.
“This is what a king looks like,” he said, “and what do we do? We pay for it with our children’s lives. And yet here we are again, wars without ends, flag-draped coffins and no one held accountable.
“They send our kids to fight. They cut our schools to pay for it. They tell us there’s no money for teachers, no money for health care, no money for our towns, but somehow, there’s always money for bombs.”
Mullock said this administration is stripping away voting rights and women’s rights, gerrymandering and stacking the courts while handing tax cuts to billionaires.
“This country was founded in resistance to tyranny and sustained by a skepticism of power,” he told the crowd, saying those in power fear movements like No Kings around the nation — “a million hands locked together, neighbors who have never spoken, standing side by side.”
“Workers, parents, students, veterans, people who were told they have nothing in common, realizing that they’ve been fighting the same fight all along, because power only holds when we are separated, when we are isolated, when we are convinced we are alone, but we are not alone,” Mullock said. “We are many. And when we move together, when we speak together and when we fight together, there is no machine big enough to silence us, no lie strong enough to divide us, no king powerful enough to rule us.”
Alexander said he would try to stay calm, but he was “pissed off.”
“We have a man in the White House … who says, ‘I can do whatever I want; I’m the president,’” Alexander said, “one person putting our country at war.”
“You stay pissed and let that anger lead you to action, such as being out here this morning and working for the candidate of your choosing to defeat Jeff Van Drew,” he told the crowd. “We must stay together in this effort.”
Alexander, a civil rights attorney who spent decades in law enforcement, called for action not just now to create a blue wave in November’s congressional election, but after the Trump administration is gone. Once “people like me are in Congress,” he said, they’ll convince the new speaker to take two years to “build the criminal investigation against the Trump Empire.
“We have a lot of power in Congress if Congress just takes it back,” he said.
Temple, running with Eric Morey on the Democratic ticket for county commissioner, called out their Republican opponents, Curtis Bashaw and Patrick Rosenello, because they haven’t spoken out against Trump or Van Drew. That, he said, makes them complicit in the Iran war, rising gas prices and rising grocery prices.
Pierce talked about her organization that has grown to more than 100 volunteers, mounted vigils for the two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, gunned down by Immigration and Customers Enforcement in Minnesota, and exists to “stand up and protect our immigrant community.”
“We have built a thriving partnership with El Pueblo Unido, which is manning our hotline and training our volunteers to rapid response to ICE incursions in Cape May County,” Pierce said.
The group has trained volunteers to provide “know your rights” training at churches and community centers, identified immigrant attorneys to help at affordable rates and established a family preparedness clinic “so that if the unthinkable happens, if parents are torn from their children and whisked to detention centers hundreds or even thousands of miles away, their children will be nurtured by other family or friends instead of falling into the public welfare system,” she said.
“Not all heroes wear uniforms. We are ordinary people like Minnesotans,” Pierce said. “We are organizing, educating, standing up. Join us. Donate. Like El Pueblo Unido, we say the people united will never by defeated.”
More information of the group is available at capemayimmigrantsupport.org.
– STORY and PHOTOS by DAVID NAHAN/Ocean City Sentinel and Cape May Star and Wave staff
