More than 3,100 anti-authoritarian protests are scheduled across the US and at least 15 other countries on Saturday. All these events will take place under a single banner: No Kings.
Formally launched in June to fight back against Trump administration policies, the No Kings movement has grown with astonishing speed – its second and most recent mass protest in October drew an estimated 7 million participants. Organizers expect Saturday’s events to be the biggest protest in American history.
But the movement is also leaderless, broad in cause and hasn’t advanced any policy demands. Some social movements experts recognize No Kings’ momentum but question if it needs clearer goals.
“There’s not any one way to get people into a movement. You want to have as many doors open as possible because you have to reach people wherever they are,” said Hahrie Han, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and the co-author of Prisms of the People: Power & Organizing in Twenty-First-Century America. “The bigger challenge is, once they’re there, how do you keep them there, and then how do you channel that engagement in collective ways?”
But organizers say they are aware of such critiques and that these choices are all by design.
“The name No Kings is, in and of itself, a demand. It is a direct repudiation of this administration, of this regime, of its unconstitutional, illegal, immoral and frankly profane actions,” said Hunter Dunn, an organizer with the 50501 movement, one of the groups behind No Kings. “It’s a declaration of intent that we are going to return power back to the people.”
I don’t know your local area and I’m not going to do that research for you. Look up who’s running in your state and district, for every position down the ballot, in federal, state, and local government. Don’t be lazy.
Find out who you agree with most, or as a last resort who you disagree with least, and if you question whether you can trust the information that’s available about them, dig a little deeper.
Look into their voting record to see if it aligns with their stated values and goals. Look into their financials, who they receive donations from, where they primarily source their campaign funds, whether they own any stock. Look into their public activities, whether they’re civically active in the causes they claim to care about. Look into their career before they got into politics and ask yourself what that says about them.
But don’t go on lemmy asking people to tell you who to vote for. That’s just asinine.
How’s all that research working out for you so far?