Guidance Refused, Life Lost
How Utah 50501’s Arrogance Led to the Tragic Events of the “No Kings” Event in Salt Lake City
Opinion
I am a socialist and a member of the leftist gun community, and I briefly organized with Utah 50501 this year.
At one point, I was tasked with creating curriculum and protocols for Utah 50501’s security team that would’ve prepared them to interact with friendly/supportive rally attendees who came to protests open-carrying a firearm. I observed this phenomenon many times here in Salt Lake City while attending the Black Lives Matter rallies in 2020, and by the time I was drafting up these guidance materials for Utah 50501, they had already had one or two open-carry protests show up in support, which is what spurred me to develop guidance materials for them.
As a member of the leftist gun community, I understand why some leftists open-carry at protests. Liberals are largely against gun ownership, and bloodthirsty fascists are not. Do the math. Leftist gun owners frequently come to these protests to protect the people who are there to speak out but who have also rejected a means of defending themselves. Open-carry protesters aren’t guaranteed to always be wise or sufficiently careful, but they do this out of a desire to help and to protect people.
The materials I created involved the following types of guidance:
- How to determine whether an open-carry protester is being responsible and safe
- How to determine if an open-carry protester is actually there in support of the event or might instead be a threat
- How to speak to an open-carry protester in a way that doesn’t cause distrust, alarm, or defensiveness
- How to approach an open-carry protester in a way that encourages a respectful exchange so that you can understand their motives and establish rapport
- How to reassure the crowd nearby that this person isn’t a danger to them
- How to create trust between the open-carrier, the people around them, and the event organizers
The security team rejected my guidance as “unqualified”, saying that their experience as ex-cops was more qualifying (while also choosing to derogatorily defame the Black Lives Matter movement in the same conversation). This was the first I had heard that these people were ex-cops; I was horrified and immediately cut off contact with the security team.
To my alarm, the Utah 50501 administration team was unconcerned with this development, and unfortunately this was part of a broader pattern at Utah 50501. They were uniformly inexperienced liberals, most of whose political knowledge didn’t extend past the 2024 election. They had no exposure to political history, political analysis, political theory, or political praxis. And yet despite their inexperience and lack of knowledge, they routinely exhibited surprisingly intense disdain for the perspective (given to them by numerous people on numerous occasions) that they needed to seek out and respect the input of experienced organizers, well-studied leftists, and leaders of marginalized communities, whose combined experience and knowledge could contribute to the betterment of Utah 50501’s event safety, the clarity of their analysis, the vision of their theory, and the efficacy of their praxis.
Sadly, the organizers had nothing but contempt for the radical and educated perspectives of seasoned organizers, knowledgeable leftists, and powerful voices from marginalized communities. This contempt for those with more knowledge and experience led to a mass exodus of dissenting voices (myself included) from Utah 50501, further homogenizing the perspectives represented in the movement’s inner circle. And now, ultimately, a beloved community member is dead as a result of their unthinkable arrogance. And to make matters worse, over a week after the killing, Utah 50501 still refuses to take responsibility for their negligence and bravado, hoping (as liberals always do) that a leftist will take the fall for their mistakes.
Thankfully, Arturo Gamboa has been released without charges related to the death of Afa Ah Loo. But it didn’t shock me that Utah 50501 had hoped to corruptly pin the consequences for Ah Loo’s death onto Gamboa. On several occasions before I left, the other organizers expressed the belief that 50501 is the resistance to the Trump regime. Because of their complete and total ignorance of the preexisting ecosystem of leftist activists and organizations, many within Utah 50501 see themselves as some sort of vanguard and as leaders to whom the disorganized masses look for hope and guidance. This utterly laughable liberal delusion was amusing months ago when I was trying to educate them on and dissuade them of it (which they of course resisted), but now that delusion takes on a darker, much less amusing character, as I do truly believe that they could rationalize anything to themselves–including making an innocent man face the consequences for their crime–in order to preserve their influence and reputation, because they truly believe themselves to be the one and only real resistance to fascism.
I am complicit in the disaster that is Utah 50501. I naively thought that I could push their movement to the left and radicalize the local organizers, and when I discovered that I couldn’t, I failed to adequately alert my community about how dangerous they were, because some friends of mine remained there, and I naively trusted those people to have more influence on Utah 50501 than it would have on them.
At a time when the general public is experiencing immense fear, anger, and grief over what is happening here on Turtle Island, Utah 50501 chose to reject the chance to contribute to meaningful resistance and radicalization. They instead chose to use their influence to vampirically suck all of the air out of the room for themselves, glutting themselves upon the narcissistic personal validation they were getting from standing in front of crowds, putting their faces on social media posts, and giving speeches at the same rally held over and over again with no direction. They routinely shut down discussion of any other form of political action beyond repeatedly funneling people’s fear and anger into the same dead-end, meaningless gestures that amounted to nothing more than trusting the very systems that got us here to begin with.
They actively sabotaged several attempts to put a formal decision-making structure in place, because the disorganization created an environment in which whoever’s voice was loudest got their way, and that was serving them. The only organizational “structure” that existed was a series of nested group chats in which one earned their way into the next most exclusive group chat by kissing the right people’s rings.
I am ashamed to have ever been associated with Utah 50501, and I will live with that shame forever, because their legacy now is simply a meaningless parade of materially empty “protests,” full of preening, self-deception, gatekeeping, and virtue signaling, all leading up to and amounting to absolutely nothing–nothing but the tragically senseless death of a good man, and the heinously unjust arrest of an innocent one.
Utah 50501 is Afa Ah Loo’s death.
Utah 50501 is Arturo Gamboa’s violated rights.
And they are nothing else.
I’m so sorry for having had any role in it at all.
Published anonymously, a leftist who tried to work within 50501
