"No Kings" rally in Orange stays safe while violence mars Culpeper protest
Man arrested for driving his vehicle into peaceful protesters leaving Culpeper event
“I couldn’t stay quiet.”
That’s what Karen Fisher of Lahore said when I asked why she was participating in the “No Kings” protest against President Donald Trump on Saturday (June 14) in Orange. “They’re taking all the good things away and giving them to the 1%. It’s not democracy. We have a president who doesn’t follow the law,” she said.
“Everything’s for sale” in Trump’s orbit, Fisher continued. However, “Democracy is not for sale, and that’s what we are here to remind him. Nobody here wants to pay for a military parade. They want healthcare. They want childcare.”
With Trump’s military parade (costing millions in taxpayer dollars) happening later that day in D.C., about 175 people stood along Madison Road on a muggy afternoon near the Orange County Democrats’ headquarters. Having been instructed by members of Indivisible to avoid confrontation, they smiled at passersby and held up signs with messages like “Make America Follow the Constitution Again,” “Felon Dictator Traitor,” and “I believe in the Constitution checks & balances.”
The event, one of about 2,000 such rallies held across the country on Saturday, included Democrats from Orange, Greene and Madison counties as well as anyone else who wanted to take part in the peaceful protest. The day was shadowed by violence both far away and close by. In Minnesota, a Democratic state legislator and her husband were murdered just hours before the rallies began, and another Minnesota state lawmaker and his wife were shot multiple times. The suspect in these cases was arrested after a massive manhunt.
Later on Saturday, after the rally ended in Orange, word came that a suspect had been arrested for driving an SUV into a group of peaceful protesters leaving the “No Kings” rally in Culpeper. This crime calls to mind the very similar act of mayhem committed in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017, when a young man drove his car into a group of counter-protesters departing the infamous “Unite the Right” rally. The vehicular assault injured many and killed counter-protester Heather Heyer.
Earl Ryder: ““My beliefs and the people’s across the street are very different”
In Orange, though, Saturday’s rally proceeded with only minor friction between the protesters and a small group of men in front of the Confederate statue at the intersection of Main Street and Madison Road. I found it interesting that there was some traveling back and forth between the two sides, including a visit from a woman talking with the men who then circled back to ask if they wanted bottled water. They declined her offer in a polite exchange.
When I went over to talk with these gents, one of them, who didn’t give his name, told me he’s a native of Orange and proud of his Confederate heritage. He said he and the other men were guarding the statue. As we talked further, he spoke with mingled sorrow and bitterness about the Confederate statues taken down, after tumultuous debate, in Charlottesville and Richmond. He said that Lee-Jackson Memorial Park in Rockbridge County is the logical home for the discarded statues. As for the statue in front of the Orange courthouse, he said it’s “history” that should not be removed or destroyed. He didn’t give me his name or agree to a photo, but he was willing to talk, and that counts for a lot.
Earl Ryder of Gordonsville and I also had a chat. When I asked him about the sticker on his t-shirt (“86 White Liberals”), he peeled it off and threw it away. A self-employed handyman who had a roof to work on later in the afternoon, he said, “My beliefs and the people’s across the street are very different.”
This was not to say that he wasn’t curious about those people. He’d gone over to their side to ask several of them, teasingly, whether they’d chosen Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for president in 2024—a question that didn’t go over well, as I found out later from rally participants. His efforts at open-carry cookie diplomacy had gone better. When one of the “No Kings” protesters offered him a cookie, he made a point of buying another one from the new cookie shop on Main Street and giving it to someone on the rally side.
Like the other man I spoke to, Ryder wanted to talk about the Civil War—a topic not top of mind for the “No Kings” protesters across the road, nor something I had been thinking about until just then. Still, we were standing next to a Confederate statue, so we talked about Grant and Lee and the history of racism in the North. I listened. Ryder listened. And he let me take his picture.
Jackson Neal-Pretus: “I most object to the chaos of it”
Jackson Neal-Pretus was one of the younger protesters in the “No Kings” crowd. An international relations major enrolled in a joint degree program offered by the College of William & Mary and the University of St Andrews in Scotland, he is from Barboursville—the Orange County side, he was quick to add. He told me he’d planned on a career with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) “supporting people needier than myself, but that channel is closed to me now,” because Trump has greatly reduced the size and scope of the long-running program.
I asked him what he finds most objectionable about Trump and his actions. “I most object to the chaos of it,” he said, citing the president’s near-daily back-and-forth on tariffs as one example. Further, he said he objects to the country’s vulnerability to “the totally unpredictable, personal whims of an unstable personality.”
His mother, Jessica Neal, also shared her thoughts. She has attended protests in Charlottesville but figured this time, “Orange might need [my support] more.” With the upcoming 250th anniversary of the Constitution in mind, she praised the system of checks and balances that Orange County’s own President James Madison architected and said she believed that in the end it would endure, despite the current threats to democracy. As for the “No Kings” rallies across the country, she said, “I think right now, you are seeing an outpouring of American citizens because we do believe, many of us, that those checks and balances aren't holding as strongly as we’d like.”
Among the other protesters I talked to was Lucy Colby, also of Barboursville, who said her local roots go back 300 years. She said she believes many people who support “the insanity” of Trump are “really decent people” whose lack of education has done them a grave disservice.
Colby said, “A lot of these people don’t have the tools which an education would have given them. And you can’t try to convey that to them now because it could take a lifetime to try to educate them because they never had a good grounding of it to begin with. So, you can't talk about this issue or that issue, because they don't even have enough education [to discuss it], and it’s not their fault.”
Across Madison Road from most of the “No Kings” protesters, Lynne Lewis, vice chair of the Orange County Democratic Committee, held up a sign pointing fellow protesters toward the community parking lot. Praising the day’s turnout as “fantastic,” she said, “We might have more people than we expected. I talked to a first-time protester. I think we have more than I expected in that category.”
While some people driving by honked loudly and repeatedly in fervent support of the “No Kings” protest, Lewis said others, whom she called “crypto” supporters, offered small waves of encouragement.
There was, as expected, pushback from Trump supporters driving by. Lewis said some raised their middle fingers as they sailed past and yelled out “Happy birthday, Trump!” (Trump turned 79 on the same day as the parade he authorized.) But the “militia” that Orange County rally organizers were warned about never materialized. “They must be sleeping in,” Lewis speculated with a wide smile.
Byrd’s Eye View—Editor’s commentary
Karen Hamilton: “We don’t do lawlessness” (exceptions apply)
In the days leading up to the “No Kings” rallies, Karen Hamilton of Orange told her social media followers to watch out for protesters from “the left.” A District 62 candidate in the Republican primary for state delegate, she claimed that protesters might be “throwing bricks” or “lighting cars on fire.”
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