Oh, the violence! The bloodshed!

House speaker Mike Johnson had characterized Saturday’s No Kings protests—there were more than 2,700 nationwide, with roughly seven million participants—as “Hate America” rallies that he said would unleash “Marxists, socialists, Antifa advocates, anarchists and the pro-Hamas wing of the far-left Democrat party.” Michigan Republican Lisa McClain portrayed the brewing events as guaranteed to feature a “mob of radicals.” Other Trump GOP toadies and kowtowing lickspittles predicted terrorist activity.

So there I was at the local No Kings gathering near my Long Island home, recalling the history of Edward R. Murrow’s dire greeting to American radio listeners in 1940 amid the Nazis’ 57-day bombing blitz of the British capital: “This is London.” Would we all live through it?

In reality, the two-hour gathering of some 3,000 people at Long Island’s Babylon Town Hall was about as destructive—as hostile, as murderous—as a bake sale. You could encounter far more danger trying to cross any local street overrun by speeding, lane-changing knuckleheads. What the Republican leaders envisioned—what they tried to sell—was their alternate reality of invading undesirables torching public property and inflicting injury. Something akin to—ahem—a January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters.

Talk about fake news. Here’s some of the stuff I witnessed in what was nothing more than citizens’ peaceful resistance to a decidedly unpopular President:

Most of the crowd toted signs, many creatively expressing an opposition to Donald Trump’s authoritarian policies and the corruption in his administration. “Deport Dictators.” “No Kings Since 1776.” “You’re Fired!” “Never Again Is Now.” “Orange Lies Matter.” “MAGA: Morons Are Governing America.”

Plenty of American flags were waved, with chants of “U.S.A! U.S.A!” along with other rejections of Trump’s depiction of their involvement, such as “I’m Not Being Paid to Protest.”

The folks lined the side of a busy highway, generating cacophonous cheering and horn-honking from the endless stream of passing motorists, who regularly lent raised fists, thumbs-up and applause in solidarity with the demonstrators. Many on-the-move observers raised cell phones at their car windows to record the thoroughly non-threatening action.

It was festive. Gregarious. The only bit of nastiness came from two—maybe there were three—fellows among the thousands driving by who brandished a middle finger to the rallying crowd. Those gestures were answered cheerfully with peace signs and drowned out by occasional chanting.

“This is what democracy looks like!” “No Kings! No Kings!” “Hey, hey, ho, ho; Donald Trump has got to go!”

A few posters paired the slang numerical term “to cancel” or “get rid of” with Trump’s place in the order of U.S. presidents: “86 47.” The day’s tone was nothing like “hate;” rather, it was concern. There was no haranguing or provocation. Just we vassals reminding of the country’s real social order. “These,” one sign announced, “are what patriots look like.”

Some protesters wore goofy inflatable costumes. Some sported “No Kings” sweatshirts. Most, like me, had gray hair. A 26-year-old guessed that more people from his age group “don’t care as much” about current realities, though he was quick to add that he was there because “I care.” An older fellow guessed at the thinking of those absent youngsters: “What’s democracy?”

The satirist Andy Borowitz “reported” that speaker Johnson “accused participants in Saturday’s No Kings protests of “blatantly exercising their First Amendment rights,” and that “when the framers of the Constitution wrote the First Amendment, they did not intend people to take it literally.”

Worse, what Johnson actually said at the conclusion of the No Kings rallies was that “there were a lot of hateful messages,” and that “we have video and photos of pretty violent rhetoric….saying fascists must die and all the rest.”

Somehow I missed all that. There were seven policemen on hand for the assumed apocalypse I attended. The most pressing duty required of any of them, in assuring that no lives were lost, was when one of the cops offered to press the traffic signal button to allow a couple of folks, unsteady with walking canes, to navigate a crosswalk.

Really.