After the Trump administration painted peaceful protesters and Democrats as enemies of the U.S., protesters in La Plata County responded by throwing a dance party in Durango and jamming out to upbeat tunes in Bayfield.
Despite welcoming and sometimes jovial vibes, a government shutdown, threats of selling off public lands and the erosion of democracy were on the minds of Durango and Bayfield residents on Saturday for No Kings Day of Peaceful Protests against the Trump administration.
Nearly 7 million Americans had marched and protested in defiance of the Trump administration at more than 2,700 peaceful rallies around the country on Saturday, according to NoKings.org.
Saturday morning in Bayfield, 200 or more people congregated along both sides of Bayfield Parkway outside Town Hall. That afternoon in Durango, thousands danced in Rotary Park and denounced the Trump administration before marching on north Main Avenue to 32nd Street and back.
At least 3,000 people turned out to Rotary Park in Durango, with more in the wings on the Animas River Trail and along north Main Avenue. They carried signs with phrases such as, “Speak truth to power,” “Stop the reign of error” and “When tyranny becomes law rebellion becomes duty.”
Many protesters appeared cheery and in good spirits. In Durango, Dan King rallied the crowd and invited the people to dance to music such as Plastic Ono Band’s “Give Peace a Chance.”
Some people wore inflatable costumes of pandas, unicorns, velociraptors, Rex from “Toy Story,” and a frog wearing a bandanna.
The frog costume may have been a reference to recent protests in Portland where protesters wore vibrant costumes and danced tauntingly in front of immigration officials, presenting a different picture than the White House’s description of Portland as a “war zone.”
Some protesters carried red and black anarchism flags, and two people activated smoke bombs that sprayed thick red clouds into the air as the crowd dispersed, some toward downtown and others to march on north Main Avenue.
In Bayfield, resident Laurie Robinson played her bagpipes as she walked up and down the sidewalk outside Town Hall. A man standing across the road dipped two long sticks linked by rope into a soapy bucket, lifted the sticks above his head and spread them apart to let the wind blow large, glossy bubbles into the air.
Another woman wearing a different frog costume carried portable speakers playing upbeat music, including Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline,” Los Del Río’s “Macarena” and Sublime’s “What I Got.”
She carried a sign that read, “United we ribbit, divided we croak.”
The woman declined to provide her name, saying she is an employee of the U.S. Forest Service.
“They have been waiting to do this,” she said, referring to proposed sales of public lands to private buyers. “They, as the billionaires, can make more and more money off this, and that’s what they’ve been waiting (for). But this is our land. I’m a public landowner. You are a public landowner.”
She said letting private industries take unchecked control will lead to public lands being degraded and destroyed. Or, she added, public lands will become an amenity for the wealthy and unaffordable for working Americans.
Public lands contain resources like timber and minerals the country can use – as long as they are extracted wisely, she said.
“Our country is falling into authoritarianism,” she said, adding America’s degradation of democracy mirrors what happened to Germany with the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
Influence over the free press, control of free speech and educational institutions, and deploying the military into cities over domestic issues are all similarities she drew between the contemporary U.S. and Nazi Germany.
She said the Holocaust – the state-sponsored and systematic murder of 6 million Jews and millions of other people – was awful and she does not mean to take away from its significance – but she fears the U.S. is heading down a similar path.
She said she recently visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the similarities were “shocking.”
The Holocaust and mass murder did not materialize from nowhere, she said. It started with persecution.
“We’re sending people with no due process to foreign countries and foreign prisons, just like Germany did,” she said. “They started in Poland with their concentration camps, and they didn’t start with camps. They started with these laws to slowly degrade democracy.”
Bayfield resident Judy Blaisdell, a member of the Pine River Rising activist group, said she’s been protesting outside Town Hall since March.
She is saddened and fearful for the country, she said, because it’s fraught with division.
“People identifying our groups as terrorists, that is very frightening to me,” she said. “Watching our friends and neighbors be dragged away. There have been a lot of people arrested in this area.”
She was referencing continued arrests of people suspected to be undocumented immigrants by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as well as statements made by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Thursday ahead of the countrywide No Kings demonstrations.
“The Democrat Party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens and violent criminals,” Leavitt said in an interview on Fox News.
Leavitt is wrong, Blaisdell said.
Blaisdell said Pine River Rising is nonpartisan and aims to build community.
“We’re just a group of people that care about what’s going on in the world, and we care about each other, particularly our neighbors,” she said. “ … We’d like to start a conversation with anyone that wants to talk to us.”
In Durango, elected officials and former officials spoke to a crowd in Rotary Park that spilled onto the Animas River Trail and onto the sidewalk along north Main Avenue.
Rick Petersen, a Durango School Board member who is seeking reelection, spoke about the importance of preserving education and protecting students. He decried attempts to smear DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion).
“It’s not an acronym, it’s not a buzz word, it’s not a dirty word,” he said. “Diversity of community benefits from a diverse population with many experiences. Every human being wants to feel included, wants to feel safe. That’s what this school district is about. Equity for every single person.”
School board members Erika Brown and Andrea Parmenter, who are also seeking reelection, stood by Petersen.
La Plata County Commissioner Elizabeth Philbrick spoke about the fall of democracy. Without explicitly mentioning the president, she said the Trump administration is following an authoritarian playbook to divide communities, override constitutional protections and take power.
She said authoritarian regimes across the world and throughout history have attacked free press and spread disinformation, degraded independent institutions by installing loyalists, scapegoated people to turn them against their neighbors, and expanded their powers while dismantling free and fair elections.
Protesters on the gazebo at Rotary Park held signs with white text against black backdrops that read “Signs of fascism” in underlined text and messages beneath such as “Voter suppression,” Controlling the media“ and “Persecuting minorities.”
“You will find a scapegoat, whether it is a minority, an immigrant or a political rival, they are the problem,” Philbrick said, delivering a civics crash course on authoritarianism. “There is no owning any of the mistakes, the leader will not do that. They become the self-proclaimed savior, defending the real people against imagined enemies.”
cburney@durangoherald.com
A previous version of this article gave an incorrect name for Dan King, who led chants at Rotary Park in Durango, and Rick Peterson, a speaker and Durango School Board member.
