Anti-authoritarian rallies standing up to Trump have broad objectives and no leaders. Organizers say that is by design

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.”

  • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    81·
    19 hours ago

    Doesn’t matter when you’re there for your community. And once you’ve been, it changes you, even if nothing else seems to come of it.

    Once you’ve been to a protest, you are never quite the same: there is a power to seeing people all around you raising their signs and voices to express the same things you believe yourself, and talking with your neighbors, and recognizing you all have far more in common than anyone ever let you believe before.

    It’s real, it’s tangible, and it’s why the First Amendment is literally the first: it was so important that it was first on the list of things that the states said, “Without these amendments, we will not ratify the Constitution.” Freedom of speech combined with the right to assemble is so powerful that it is terrifying to people trying to hold onto illegitimate rule, enough to make them send armies into cities and bad actors into online discussions trying to shut them down any way they can.

    Once you’ve been to a protest, propaganda, no matter how carefully crafted, will never have quite the same hold on you that it still does on those who have never met their community marching to express the same beliefs: the personal experience proves the lie.

    And then when there’s opportunity to do more, you’ve already met the very people making it happen in your own town: win/win all around.

    Oh, and you’re wrong, because the administration listens just fine: it makes them crazy. After the last No Kings, the orange chancre was throwing out AI videos shitting on the people of this country and then tore down the East Wing without notice. On Friday, January 30, when people were skipping work and shopping and coming out all over the country spontaneously, without any prior planning like No Kings, just to express the outrage over the ICE murders in Minneapolis, the administration released another huge tranche of Epstein files just to try to get the headlines back.

    So yeah, they hear. But honestly, fuck the administration. If it makes you feel better you can whine and cry because they’re not handing you a personally addressed gilded apology letter for all their misdeeds, but I’ll be out there with my community. We’re not waiting on them for anything.