In the days following the last “No Kings” protest, a protester — Rosalyn Tosh — made an Instagram post alleging an organizer with Indivisible, one of the two organizations to lead “No Kings,” confronted her after she led pro-union and pro-Palestine chants at the rally.
In the post, Tosh, a Carnegie Mellon student currently suspended for interrupting a talk the CTO of Boeing gave at the university, mentioned the organizer by name as Tracy Baton, a volunteer organizer with Indivisible Pittsburgh who Tosh said she has worked with in the past.
Baton did not clarify whether the interaction did or did not occur, but did say any disagreement over the megaphone was unrelated to the nature of Tosh’s chants.
According to Baton, she doesn’t specifically remember if the incident happened or who was involved.
“I do know that if someone had taken our megaphone, I would take it from them,” said Baton.
She did not respond to the allegation that she had handed Tosh the megaphone.
Baton said the Indivisible rallies are highly structured and only organizers reading from the list of accepted chants use the megaphones.
“It was a high security event,” said Baton. “It wasn’t a casual open mic.”
According to Tosh, Baton handed her the megaphone herself, and Tosh carried on with the same chants Baton was leading for a while.
“I ran out of stuff to say and there was a group behind me that had started a union chant, so I started doing that one too,” said Tosh. She said she had led the same chant at other “No Kings” rallies before and received no backlash.
Immediately after echoing the chant through the megaphone, Tosh said Baton ran toward her and said, “Stop doing that.”
Tosh said she stopped chanting and looked around in confusion before starting a pro-Palestine chant that she said didn’t catch on.
According to Tosh, Baton began yelling into a speaker pointed directly at her rather than the crowd at the end of the march and said, “I paid for this protest.”
Baton said she actually said “I paid for this permit,” referring to the permit Indivisible had to obtain to legally shut down Downtown’s streets for the rally.
While Baton didn’t confirm or deny the allegations made against her, she said anyone not directly affiliated with Indivisible isn’t allowed to lead their own chants.
“Our people control the chanting,” Baton said. “There’s a list that’s printed out before. Spontaneous things are not welcome to happen.”
Tosh said that has not been her experience at rallies and protests in the past, including other “No Kings” events.
“Invisible has some rights to say what chants are going to be done but that’s not really how protests and rallies operate,” Tosh said. “You have to let other groups operate independently.”
She said that although Indivisible has a reputation as politically moderate compared to other protests and rallies, she didn’t expect the events she is alleging to have happened.
Baton said the negative incident represents a tiny fraction of what happened at the event, describing it as “two-tenths” of the experience.
“People were crying and telling me it meant their life — that they were changed by it,” she said.
