JANE FONDA WON'T SHUT UP

No Kings 3. March 28th, St Paul.

There is a photograph that the United States government has been trying to weaponize against Jane Fonda for fifty-four years. You have probably seen it. She is sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun in Hanoi, 1972, smiling, looking for all the world like she is personally aiming it at American planes.

The photograph has been used to call her a traitor, a communist, a disgrace. Lawmakers howled for her prosecution. Veterans burned her in effigy. The nickname "Hanoi Jane" was branded onto her hide like she was livestock, and the people who did the branding assumed it would finish her.

Here she is in St. Paul on March 28th. Eighty-seven years old. Still here. Still showing up. Still making the same people who tried to destroy her absolutely insane with rage, which at this point is simply a bonus.

Let's talk about what actually happened in Hanoi, because the mythology has so thoroughly devoured the facts that most Americans couldn't find the truth with both hands and a flashlight. Jane Fonda was not the first American to go to North Vietnam. Nearly three hundred Americans had made the trip before her. More than eighty had broadcast over Radio Hanoi before she opened her mouth. Her trip generated almost no press coverage at the time — a single, bored item in the New York Times. What she said on those broadcasts was this: she begged American military pilots to consider that they were bombing the dike system that kept millions of Vietnamese civilians from drowning. She begged them to remember that their mothers had not raised them to do this. The government disputed the facts. The facts were not in dispute.

The gun photo happened on her last day. Soldiers sang her a song. She sang back, mangling the Vietnamese words, everyone laughing. Someone steered her toward the anti-aircraft gun and she sat down, still laughing, still giddy, still caught inside the moment. The cameras flashed. Walking back to the car the full weight of what had just happened landed on her like a dropped piano. She begged her translator to make sure the photos were never published. They were published. She has apologized for that photograph publicly and repeatedly for five decades — not for going to Hanoi, not for opposing the war, not for a single word she said on those broadcasts, but for thirty seconds of carelessness that handed her enemies the only real weapon they have ever had against her. "If I was used," she later wrote, "I allowed it to happen. The buck stops here."

That kind of accountability — unhedged, unspun, owned without asterisk or caveat — is so rare in American public life that most politicians wouldn't recognize it if it introduced itself. And it has never once stopped her from showing up.

Before Hanoi, she was already giving the government insomnia. She returned from France in 1968, watched the Tet Offensive and the Chicago demonstrations unfold on television, and decided she needed to be in her country doing something about what she was seeing. What she did was everything at once, at full speed, without asking permission from anyone.

She held fundraisers in her own home for the Black Panthers while the FBI had the Panthers under COINTELPRO — a covert, frequently illegal government program of surveillance, infiltration, and sabotage. She didn't just write a check and feel virtuous. When the New Orleans chapter of the Panthers was cornered in the Desire Housing Project after a police standoff and members needed to get out of state, they called Jane Fonda. She rented four cars under her own name with her own credit card and got them out. The police were surveilling her. They followed the cars. She knew the risk, assessed it, and rented the cars anyway. This is not the behavior of a dilettante. This is the behavior of someone who has decided that being on the right side is worth more than being comfortable.

The more the government came at her, the harder she leaned into it. When Nixon's people planted what they claimed were drugs in her luggage at Cleveland airport in 1970 — the pills were vitamins, a detail so clumsy it would embarrass a first-year operative — had her handcuffed and booked and photographed with her fist raised and her eyes saying try harder, they thought the scandal would demolish her college speaking tour. Her campus audiences went from hundreds to thousands overnight.

Six years ago, when asked why she kept getting arrested, Fonda's answer was the same theory of change she has operated on since 1968: she knew that if people saw her in handcuffs, tens of millions of Americans who were furious but paralyzed would start asking themselves why they were still sitting on the couch. She knew there were people who just needed someone to ask them loudly enough. She was asking. She is still asking.

Which is why she will be on the steps of the Minnesota State Capitol on March 28th, at the No Kings 3 national flagship rally — the event the movement chose to plant in Minnesota because this is where the Trump administration chose to make its ugliest demonstration of what it is willing to do and who it is willing to do it to.

Power has had fifty-four years to shut Jane Fonda up. It has a perfect record of failure. On March 28th she will be on the steps of the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul, alongside Joan Baez, Jane Fonda, Maggie Rogers, Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and every labor leader and democracy champion the movement could fit on a stage — asking you one more time to get off your ass and join them. Three marches depart at noon from Harriet Island Regional Park, St. Paul College, and Western Sculpture Park, converging on the Capitol at two o’clock.

Jane Fonda has never once in eighty-seven years waited for permission to do the right thing. Neither should you. March 28th. St. Paul. The Capitol steps. No more excuses.

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