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.”
Leave it up to Americans to tell others to fix the problems they created
So you don’t have anything of value to add?
That would still be more than you have added
Smug motherfucker. A lot of people in the USA are one absence from losing their job. Most of us cannot handle an unexpected $500 expense.
How do you propose we just up and protest for weeks? The nokings protests are alleoing people to build support networks so a general strike is actuslly feasible. So they are accomplishing something.
You, on the other hand, continue to be useless.
Shouldn’t either of these things be enough for people to PROTEST EVERY FUCKING DAY!??! Add to that that your current “big strong leader” is a pants shitting murdering pedophile who is speed running your country off a cliff and I would feel that if I were American, I would be protesting every fucking day, after work if need be. Americans have been fucked over left and right for countless decades and so far they’ve been a champ and took the fucking like the sheep they are.
How to I propose you do that? By going out every day to protest? If you can’t do without your job, then do it before and or after your job. Do your job while wearing a protest sign if you can. There are hundreds of ways, and yes, they will inconvenience you, and I’m sorry about that, I’m sure jews back in Poland 1939 surely also were very inconvenienced by all that was happening.
The nokings protests, until today, have done nothing of visible value. If it built support networks, then wow, awesome, could have used those years and years ago, but better something than nothing. Now that you have those networks, what are you going to do with them, besides more “nothing”?
You call me smug, I call you an American who needs to get off his ass and do something and stop looking at the rest of the world for a saviour