An Editor’s Note
For all my love of words, I’m lousy at protest signs. Six maybe eight words is perfect. Pickets are a lot like billboards. You’re driving by, so highway ads need to be sparse for comprehension. That’s the same with demonstrations, where picketers stand on a sidewalk as cars whiz by. The No Kings 3 planned for March 28 or last October’s No Kings 2 and June’s No Kings 1 are the opposite, with walkers passing bystanders, with a further complexity of hundreds marching on all sides.
My poster for No Kings 1 held 28 words. Friends had to look at it for long moments, while no one else bothered. Learning my lesson for No Kings 2, I walked with my union sisters and brothers just with my fist raised, down Fayetteville’s Dickson Street.
We face so much mishegoss that I don’t know if I can choose what to Sharpie on my board, much less make the phrase clever for Saturday, the third go-round for the No Kings nationwide civil demonstration.
Woman: Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?
Johnny (Marlon Brando): What’ve you got?
- Starting an unprovoked war with Iran with minimal planning
- Mocking longtime allied nations, favoring the despots of countries large and small
- Concealing Epstein files
- Crony, not to mention incompetent, Cabinet and agency leadership choices
- Favoring hocus-pocus over science
- Whitewashing historical displays
I could keep going, huh? That’s just a few of the national woes.
Arkansas state officials who are overwhelmingly Trump Republicans ape what’s been working for Washington, executive orders and appointments, and with manipulative legislators when new laws are needed:
- Subsidizing private K-12 education with money set for public schools
- Patronage appointments of agency leaders and board members
- Buying remote acreage for a huge prison with poor access and no water
There’s more where those came from. Further down, local governments throughout Northwest Arkansas, technically nonpartisan, also seem to be taking lessons from the White House at times.
The University of Arkansas? Here at essentially the smallest government, the decision makers turn to cowing. They’re taking the path of least Resistance.
What would happen if campus leadership heeded Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century. Those include “Do not obey in advance,” “Beware the one-party state,” “Believe in truth” and “Listen for dangerous words.”
Where would we be if they had tried to avoid the awkwardness of:
- State leaders persuading U of A executives to withdraw an offer of Law School deanship, a scholar chosen after a two-year nationwide search
- Staying mum as the governor endorsed the establishment on state campuses Turning Point USA and its high school division Clubs America
- UA System trustees reversing years of Razorback Athletics sending some revenue to the academic side, demanding a plan with just weeks’ notice for the university to subsidize athletics with millions of dollars
- University leadership, advised by cautious counsel, continuing to hang hundreds of posters of one translation of the Ten Commandments after a federal judge called the state law encouraging this clearly unconstitutional. Yes, the judge limited the ruling’s scope to six public school districts, out of the 236 K-12 districts statewide and no mention of higher education the law also covers. Why wouldn’t a civilian variation of “Don’t obey unlawful orders” apply?
There’s other duck-and-covers. Complicity is the tails side of the same gold Trump coin.
When it comes to the pickets that we No Kings marchers could wave, my best advice is to choose what worries you the most, this week.
© 2026 Ben S. Pollock
This column now slightly revised first was published as “What’ve You Got?” in the March 2026 newsletter of the UA-Fayetteville Education Association / Local 965, where Ben Pollock serves as vice president.
