BY: ANNA KAMINSKI
Kansas Reflector
TOPEKA — The American dream Maranda Kealy was promised as a kid is nowhere to be found, she said at a rally Thursday in Topeka attended by hundreds in a display of collective action against President Donald Trump’s second term.
“It’s not the one any of us were promised,” she said.
Kealy, a 22-year-old from the small town of Harveyville about 45 minutes southwest of Topeka, held a sign that read, “Dude: This is so not the American dream.”
“We were promised freedom and the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” Kealy said, “but the administration has taken that to mean life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for some people, not all.”
The political grassroots group 50501 organized the event in honor of International Workers’ Day, celebrated on May 1 along with the European holiday May Day. The same group convened weeks before on April 5 at the state Capitol for a day of action, drawing a crowd of thousands. Thursday’s protest was more modest, with a crowd of around 300.
Kealy works for the U.S. Postal Service, and she is a member of the LGBTQ+ community. Both were impetuses for her presence on the Statehouse grounds.
“Every American deserves due process. Every American deserves a chance to live the American dream, and every person deserves a chance to have their voice heard,” Kealy said.
A mishmash of anti-Trump, pro-Ukraine, anti-Putin, pro-democracy, anti-Elon Musk signs and American flags — both upside down and right side up — speckled the south lawn of the Kansas Statehouse as the event’s speakers railed against the Trump administration and the president’s supporters.
The event’s speakers included 50501 organizers, Overland Park Democratic Sen. Cindy Holscher, the vice president of chapter 66 of the National Treasury Employees Union in Kansas City, Daniel Scharpenburg, and the Rev. Nori Rost, a Unitarian Universalist minister in Lawrence and social justice advocate.
Scharpenburg’s union represents roughly 6,000 employees of the Internal Revenue Service.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard,” he said to the crowd, “but we are not OK.”
The IRS’s Kansas City office is facing the possibility of being halved, Scharpenburg said. He lobbed critiques at the Trump administration’s moves to clamp down on unions.
“I have to say, if they were not afraid of working people, they would not try to union bust, right?” he said.
The American Federation of Laborers and Congress of Industrial Organizations, an international federation of more than 60 unions, said May 1 is “the day the world celebrates the bravery of workers throughout history who have sacrificed for safety, dignity and justice on the job.”
“Our solidarity is our strength,” the AFL-CIO said in a Thursday message. “We take pride in knowing that we are a global movement standing up to the billionaires who are threatening our rights and freedoms.”
‘Not where I want to be’
Holscher reminded the crowd of the president’s promise to lower prices at the grocery store. The crowd laughed.
“It is quite apparent, however, in these first 100 days of the Trump administration, we have been sold a bill of goods,” Holscher said.
She criticized state Republican leaders, referring to them as MAGA extremists, for a handful of their decisions during the 2025 legislative session, including the creation of the Committee on Government Efficiency and their “assault” on public education funding.
She warned of Republicans sending Kansas “back to the deficit days of the Brownback administration.”
The rally was 61-year-old Army veteran David Beck’s first time participating in something like it.
“This is not where I want to be,” he said.
He lives about 90 miles from Topeka and was born and raised in southeast Kansas. Everything is at stake, he said.
“What hasn’t he harmed?” he asked, referring to Trump.
Tina Hallenbeck, of Alma, celebrated her birthday by protesting the “scary, scary things” she sees happening under the Trump administration.
She said she was especially concerned for her husband, a retired active duty Army Gulf War veteran and a federal employee with a year left to retire.
Hallenbeck appeared at the Capitol dressed in the red uniform of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood about a near-future dystopia where women are forcibly assigned to produce children.
“It feels like it makes a statement. Somebody’s going to see this,” Hallenbeck said. “Today, May Day, it’s my birthday, I’m 58 years old, and this is what I’m doing today, and it’s a shame that I have to be, but I have to be. We have to be vigilant. We can’t have 1930s Germany in the United States.”