“That’s why America is great”: New York City protesters push back with love and defiance

When I met Monica Pierce, a 55-year-old from Texas with Colombian heritage, she was standing alone with a sign that simply said “NO,” surrounded by colorful string lights. “This means a lot to me,” she said, gazing out on the crowd. “My mom went through a lot to come here.”

“Seeing this hatred is just devastating,” she replied when I asked her what worried her about America these days. She is married to an immigrant, she said, and her daughter’s boyfriend is also an immigrant. “America is just becoming so divided and hateful and entrenched in their hate,” she said. Her husband, she told me, doesn’t feel safe to turn up to the protests, so she knows that she must.

Alexis Lazo, a 23-year-old musical theater student and actor, was hanging out on scaffolding on the south side of Bryant Park, taking in his first-ever protest. He used to be a self-described “centrist,” but as a child of immigrants himself, he no longer felt as if he could stand on the sidelines. Brandishing a sign that read “No Kings, No Cults, No Orange Tyrant,” he said, “I just can’t stand by anymore and just kind of like be ignorant,” adding, “It just wouldn’t be right.”

“Keep fighting for what is right,” he implored. “Please: Keep informing yourself—and share love, and not hate.”

Other themes and causes were represented throughout the afternoon. June 14 was also the day early voting began in the city for the mayoral primary, so “Don’t Rank Cuomo!” was a frequent chant from those campaigning against former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is a frontrunner in the race for mayor. Their strategy: urge voters to leave him off the city’s ranked-choice voting ballot entirely. Other signs decried the war in Gaza, threats to students, and, of course, Trump himself.

Kaylyn Gibilterra, a 35-year-old tech worker, used the protest to showcase her insights and fears of Silicon Valley monopolies in the form of four 3D-printed handheld cut-out heads of tech bosses—Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and, inevitably, Elon Musk. “It feels very much like we’ve gone back to like a feudalist state regime,” she told me. “My goal is to hold them more accountable and just show that we should talk about the size of these monopolies.”

For others, the fight was even bigger. Quinn, a struggling 25-year-old artist who splits his time between New York City and his family home in Connecticut, turned up to champion the cause of non-violent protest and how it can change hearts and minds. He came to the city to find work in the arts, he said, but now this battle to save democracy has become his urgent calling. “As soon as the first person was deported illegally, without due process to a foreign prison, we became fascist,” he said. (Quinn didn’t want to give his last name.) “There’s a point in fascist states where people lose their right to think, to protest, to stand up.”

He stood with his mom on a Fifth Avenue stoop, watching the rain-jacket-clad young and old, Black, brown, and white protesters occasionally breaking into chants, or dancing to “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge booming from speakers. “There’s literally nothing easier than walking down the street with your peers, you know, chanting for your freedom and the freedom of all people,” he said. “That’s why America is great. That’s why America is going to continue to be great, and that’s why we can can win, we can beat fascism.”