Director Michael Moore had an unusual directive for the thousands of New Yorkers who thronged outside the Trump International Hotel Thursday night to protest on the eve of the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump.

He told them to “form an army of comedy” to defeat the incumbent administration.

“He’s affected by comedy!” Moore said. “If you make fun of him, if you ridicule him, or if you just show that he’s not popular … I’m telling you, my friends, this is how he’ll implode. This is his Achilles’ heel … everyone here has a sense of humor. Use it. Participate in the ridicule and the satire for the emperor who has no clothes. Let’s form an army of comedy and we will bring him down.”

The We Stand United rally, which was hosted by the progressive political organizing group MoveOn, featured a string of celebrity headliners. Throughout the evening, Rosie Perez, Alec Baldwin, Robert De Niro, Sally Field, Julianne Moore, Cynthia Nixon, Natalie Merchant, Mark Ruffalo, Marisa Tomei, Shailene Woodley, and Cher took the stage to speak about a wide range of issues, from immigration to queer rights, the environment, and protecting the labor movement.

The lineup also included local and national politicians and public figures, from New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to Reverend Al Sharpton and NAACP President Cornell William Brooks.

And people turned out to hear what they had to say. The protest’s organizers estimated that the crowd numbered between 20,000 to 25,000 people.

The evening emphasized unity and grassroots organizing, with a number of different campaigns and groups coming together to urge activism. Again and again, calls to mobilize around positivity, love, and togetherness, despite the fear many progressives feel at the incumbent administration, outweighed the occasional negative taunt.

Moore’s impassioned progressivism was the linchpin of the evening

Promoting his “100 days of resistance” campaign of concentrated political activism, Moore minced no words:

“As bad as we think it’s going to be, it’s going to be worse,” he said. “We’re in a dangerous moment in history where a malignant narcissist and a sociopath is in the Oval Office.”

“But here is the good news,” Moore added. “There’s more of us than there are of them.”

“He does not rule with a mandate. There is no mandate. Keep this in mind in your moments of despair. You are not alone. We are the majority. Don’t give up.”

“Wake up, brush teeth, make coffee, contact Congress,” he urged. “That’s the new morning routine.”

Alec Baldwin and other famous New Yorkers emphasized the city’s resilience and pride

Though the protest welcomed several national guests, it also felt like a very local event.

Rosie Perez, a Brooklyn native of Puerto Rican heritage, opened the evening’s lineup. “We will be united in our strength against intimidation and bullying and we will not be silenced. … Diversity is what makes this country great,” she declared, adding that Trump “has spread a message across this country that is the opposite of who we are as New Yorkers. … Hope, action, strength, and unity is our voice.”

Baldwin, whose Trump impersonation has been a permanent fixture on Saturday Night Live since the fall, began his remarks in character as the president-elect. “I’m going to a function at the Russian consulate tonight,” he joked.

“New Yorkers never lay down,” Baldwin said, before urging protesters to get involved in local civic engagement and join national movements to contact Congress.

De Niro joked with the crowd about future insults he imagined Trump would tweet in response to De Niro’s presence at the rally. “There’s only one true Raging Bull, and that is Vladimir Putin,” he quipped.

Then he called Trump “a bad example of this country” and “this city.” Questioning Trump’s statement that the US is a “dumping ground for the world,” De Niro responded with the famous Statue of Liberty poem, “New Colossus.”

“Really? These huddled masses built our city … They gave us the strength to recover after the tragedy of 9/11. Now they’re giving us the strength to persevere.”

Mayor De Blasio urged New Yorkers to “stand together in making sure there is no hatred, there is no discrimination, in our city or any city”:

“We should not let anyone define us just by what we’re against. We want to be defined by what we are for. We believe in health care for all. We believe there should be opportunity for people regardless of what they look like or where they come from. We believe in a society for the 99 percent, not just the one percent. We believe in healing the wounds between our police and our community and making us all safer together. And we believe in protecting the earth from the scourge of climate change. … Now it’s time for us to build our movement … a movement building to protect all the gains we’ve made and to protect the rights of our people.

“Our cities and our towns are the authentic America,” De Blasio told the audience. “They are the hopeful and compassionate America.”

Regarding the inauguration, he added that “tomorrow is not an end — tomorrow is a beginning.”

Al Sharpton called for moral accountability

Sharpton, also spoke to the local pride. “This is [Trump’s] hometown, but hometown folks don’t act like that,” Sharpton said.

“We may have seen you win an election, but we have not lost our minds,” Sharpton said, addressing Trump. “We don’t need to make America great. America is great when we respect each other, and stand with each other, and defend each other.”

Sharpton also noted that while the protest was happening in New York, Trump was at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, to attend a pre-inauguration concert held in his honor: “You need to talk to Lincoln while you’re there tonight,” Sharpton said, explaining that President Lincoln would tell the president-elect to protect diversity and protect states’ rights. “You can try to turn back the clock but you cannot turn back time. We are not going backwards.”

He closed by citing the Biblical parable of the good Samaritan. “What makes a good Samaritan, Mr. Trump, and a good American, is when we lift each other up rather than beat each other down. We come to lift the nation up tonight.”

“The movement has just begun.”

Unity and calls to protect each other were the evening’s biggest themes

Again and again, speakers emphasized the theme of community activism, organization, and hope, while simultaneously drawing attention to the litany of progressive political causes that many left-wing citizens feel will be in jeopardy under the Trump administration. New York’s first lady Chirlane McCray spoke of the 30 million Americans who were on the verge of losing their health care due to Trump’s plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act, while city council speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito vowed to “build a wall of resistance” against Trump.

Greenpeace director Annie Leonard declared, “If climate denialism is going to be the default position of the Trump administration, then resistance is going to be the default position of the people of this country. Because an election does not change the science.”

NAACP president Cornell William Brooks articulated a common theme of the night: intersectionality, and the need to unite to protect all identities. “We will stand against misogyny, we will stand against hate, we will stand against vice, we will stand and be strong, and we will stand together,” he vowed.

But some of the strongest rhetoric of the evening went to Cher, who made a surprise appearance.

“I’m an elitist libtard,” she joked, referring to the half-slur Trump’s supporters in the white nationalist alt-right movement use to identify progressives and liberals.

“I’ve lived through 12 presidents. … Never once did I dream that there was one whose arrogance and ignorance could change our world.”

“The only thing that can save us,” she told the audience, “is you.”