Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, stated last Friday that people who participated in the No Kings protests were Marxists, socialists, antifa advocates, anarchists, terrorists, and pro-Hamas.

A member of the U.S. Congress should know better than to speak in such untruthful, divisive, inflammatory, and frankly ridiculous terms.

I stood with hundreds of other protestors who were present at last Saturday’s No Kings rally in Elkins, and there were hundreds more passing motorists who honked in response to the “honk for democracy” sign at one end of the protest.

Mike Johnson’s opinion notwithstanding, all I saw there were hundreds of my fellow West Virginians peacefully exercising their constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech.

That scene was repeated by an estimated seven million people in several thousand communities across America last Saturday.

Of the hundreds of people that were at the Elkins rally, perhaps one hundred of them carried a sign of one type or another. Not one of those signs expressed Marxist, socialist, anarchist, pro-Hamas, terroristic, or antifa messages. Some were concerned with healthcare access and affordability, or wage inequality, or election integrity, or the demonization and persecution of immigrants and gays, or sometimes other issues.

Most of the signs, however, expressed a deep and genuine concern for the direction in which American democracy seems to be heading under the current federal government.

A government that demonizes its people for exercising their right to peaceful protest, a government that shows little respect for the rule of law, a government whose Executive branch runs roughshod over the United States congress, a government that attempts to deny its people the right to a free press, a government that fires any upper level military or civilian official that is deemed insufficiently loyal to the President, a government that bullies and intimidates law firms and universities, a government that intentionally weakens our system of public health and disease prevention, a government that sends armed troops in to American cities without cause, and a government that uses its Justice Department and its Internal Revenue Service to persecute its real or imagined enemies is not a government that believes in democracy and is clearly not a government concerned with bettering the lives of its citizens.

Why isn’t everyone out there protesting?

James Van Gundy

Elkins