Kelly Choate (right) of Springfield, Illinois, joins protesters Feb. 5 against President Trump and Elon Musk at the Illinois State Capitol in Springfield. (Photo by John Griswold)
A Reddit thread Tuesday night lit up with rumors that Elon Musk was on the move again, this time to the VA (the Department of Veterans Affairs). Some commenters were freaking out. The worry was that Musk and his young disciples would push past security in order to access military service records, medical and mental-health treatment records, and even personal disability and compensation files, to copy, use, and control the information without oversight.
(A military news website reports today that only one of Musk’s acolytes is installed in the VA, supposedly “specifically focused on identifying wasteful contracts, improving VA operations and strengthening management of the department’s IT projects.”)
In his first term Trump tried to reduce benefits to veterans, in part to force care into the private sector, where corporations could make more money. Still, 61 percent of vets voted for Trump in 2024, and one person on the Reddit thread said of the rumor, “Good. That place [the VA] is full of criminals.”
When I got a text early Wednesday morning saying there would be protest rallies at every state capitol that day, I thought they were a direct response to the unconstitutional and almost certainly illegal Musk raids on federal agencies. The moderators for these rallies came from 50501, a newly organized grassroots group “partnered with Political Revolution, a PAC and volunteer-only activist organization founded out of the conclusion of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in 2016,” USA Today says.
Excuses for not attending the rally at the Illinois Capitol, my closest option, began to spring up immediately online. Reasons included the rally being too last-minute, that someone did not have time to drive across the state in the middle of a workday, that someone could not afford gas. They were all valid, though a stranger said they would front that guy 30 bucks for gas. Another factor was that it was miserable out: 32.5 degrees, misting, and windy, with freezing rain and hazardous roads expected. I know of few places as damp and bone-chillingly raw as Springfield, Illinois, in winter.
When I arrived, about 200 people had braved the weather to rally on the statehouse steps under a statue of Lincoln. A young woman named Jade, who identified herself only as a scientist who was “mad,” read what seemed to be a brief statement from 50501 from her phone, which concerned being “the guardians of humanity and the planet, rising as one” to protest against the abuse of power. “Who comes after USAID?” she cried. (There is something more directed from the organization here.)
The small crowd waited for more, but when there was no more they turned to face the street, shouted slogans, and waved signs. Many passing cars honked in solidarity. Some of the signs were about Musk, more about Trump, but many were about sexual orientation, gender identity, reproductive rights, and DEI. It had the feel of a Harris support rally, as well as a referendum on the first sixteen days of Trump’s second coming.
An acquaintance of mine working in the statehouse had said the protest “has been dubbed a psy-op by [web denizens] with no one really knowing the organizers. Meaning possibly it is being pushed by the far right to get the left riled up and then do a false flag to enact martial law…just saying it seems very strange.”
If any of that was true, it was a failure in Springfield. The only people I saw really riled up were two middle-aged white guys with a flag (“Fuck Trump”) and a hand-lettered cardboard sign (“Trump is wrong”). The guy with the flag, wearing a shirt with a Hitler design, kept turning around excitedly to tell a young woman and an older woman that he had seen a man pass with a Gadsden pin on his lapel, and that he had told the man he would tread wherever he liked. He spun around to face the street again, and the women had to dodge the ball-end of his flagstaff.
After a time in the cold the suspicious man in question—waxed Wyatt Earp moustache and styled beard, wool vest and blazer with a complicated cross in USA colors and a Gadsden pin on his lapel—walked silently past us. The man with the flag danced and shouted at him that he would tread on him if he wanted to. He retold the story of the event to the two women, though they had just seen it happen. His buddy shouted in the direction of the man, who was long gone, and so in my face, “Trump is wrong, dump Trump!”
A protestor who had taken time from a university job to be there spoke with me. He said calmly that Musk’s young aides with their “broccoli haircuts” would not be stopped by “a couple of thousand people in state capitals.” He thought there should be a million people in DC, around the agency buildings where Musk and his crew were working. I asked him what he was doing there then, and he said, “I’d rather live in a shitty republic than an oligarchy.”
He thought a general strike was the only thing left for average citizens, and he calculated what percent of the workforce it would take to make a difference, by not showing up.
