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.”
Deliberate, apathetic, myopically optimistic that this can be voted out and things go back to how they were; all of the above? Even among the non-MAGA there’s still a lot of folks who aren’t the direct targets of the regime and unless they speak out against it could live quietly under it’s boot because of their skin color, gender, or sexuality. They’re some of the hardest people to convince to do something because there’s a fear that doing something will draw undue attention or put them at risk when they’d rather resent it but not risk it. And protesting is risky. Trigger happy cops, mass surveillance, opposition members who show up to shoot crowds or drive into them. But to not do anything is to let their scare tactics win. It is true, a million people holding signs doesn’t mean shit to this regime, but making new connections with people in your community, real connections face to face and not just anonymous internet chit chat, that is what makes these worth something.