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On October 18, I went to a No Kings protest in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I wasn’t particularly excited or energized to go; I just wanted to check it out, so I went to the closest one to me. I’ll admit I was already somewhat biased when I arrived, based on the current discourse from leftists online about the effectiveness of these protests. Still, what I saw when I arrived was even more disappointing than I expected.
The first thing I noticed was the overwhelming number of white people. Being a minority when you’re the only one in a room—or, in this case, a parade—is something you immediately register. Color blindness isn’t an option, not because you want to make everything about race, but because of an ancestral and lived survival instinct. You have to know what threats might be around you. Sundown towns still exist, after all. I mention this not to accuse the "No Kings" attendees of being racist, but to point out an invisible reality most white people never have to think about, a luxury in itself, and the invisible barriers that exist in coalition building.
Beyond that, the crowd felt overwhelmingly boomer. There were definitely more young people than I expected, and maybe it was just the neighborhood, but from what I saw in photos from other protests, there was still a clear lack of diversity. I’m not obsessed with diversity for its own sake, but if we’re talking about building a united front against fascism, we need a diversity of voices—and a lot more people—if we actually want to take our country back from neo-Nazis.
When the march started, I was ready to take the streets, only to find myself, along with tens of thousands of others, being funneled onto the sidewalk near Prospect Park. That was the second major disappointment. I know these protests are permitted, which is a problem in itself, but they couldn’t even get a street permit? One of the biggest criticisms of these events is that they comply with the very same systems causing the oppression.
When you think about it, it’s absurd to ask permission from the city—the same city that allows ICE to kidnap our neighbors at court hearings or in their homes in order to protest them. If we actually want to be in opposition to these harmful systems, we should be making it harder for them to function. We should be acting in defiance, not compliance. It’s one thing to be compliant, but these organizers weren’t even disruptive enough to get a street permit to block traffic for a couple of hours. It was a real letdown.
Also, the energy was nonexistent. I’ve been to my fair share of protests, and this one felt more like a death march. I know the crowd was older, but we were walking at an incredibly slow pace, and no one was chanting. People were mostly silent or chatting with the people they came with about unrelated things. A few Black women organizers tried hard to get chants going, but their efforts fell flat. There were a couple of brief bursts of energy, two or three rounds of loud chants, but that was it. Most people seemed to rely on their signs to make political points.
In all honesty, these protest seem to heavily rely on signage as a form of expression. As I’ve noticed at other liberal mobilizations, these events often double as competitions over who can make the wittiest, most creative sign. While I appreciate people having fun and being creative I just wish people put as much effort into building power and material change as they do into crafting clever slogans.
Although I was disappointed by the lack of energy and clear demands, I can’t fully blame the attendees. What is the demand of No Kings, exactly? Obviously “no kings” (meaning Trump), but I’m not even sure, based on their messaging, if that extends to the tech oligarchs like Peter Thiel or ideologues like Stephen Miller. I’m all on board for no kings, but what else? What happens when the king is gone? What are we asking for? Do we just want things to go back to “normal,” so the very conditions that created this “king” can continue to fester until the next tyrant arises?
What do you chant when you don’t even know what you’re fighting for, just what you are against? The No Kings protests felt as uninspired, directionless, and confused as the Democratic Party they align with.
At one point, someone in the crowd started a “Free Palestine” chant, only to be met with daggering eyes. From what I’ve seen, similar things have happened across the country. I saw a video from D.C., posted by Medea Benjamin of CodePink, showing someone told not to wave a Palestinian flag because it “makes us look like Hamas” and “that’s not what this is about.” I understand that a united front means we won’t agree on everything, but some things must be non-negotiable. When it comes to genocide, racism, and ethnic cleansing, there is no room for nuance.
Pro-Palestine protestors and leftists in general have been trying to tell liberals for ages: this country has always been fascist. The systems of racism and oppression that maintain American hegemony—imperialism, colonialism, militarism—can’t be separated from domestic policy. There’s a term, the “imperial boomerang,” which describes how governments that use repressive tactics to control colonial territories eventually bring those same tactics home. Isn’t that exactly what’s happening now?
American cities are under occupation in the same ways the IDF occupies cities across Palestine. A phrase spread widely on social media in response to the atrocities there: “What you give permission to happen there, you give permission to happen here.” And sure enough, we’re now seeing toddlers in Chicago being zip-tied and detained, not too different from the hundreds of young boys kidnapped in Gaza and held without trial. These warnings have been everywhere — from activists sounding the alarm on social media to the crackdowns unfolding on college campuses. Politicians from both parties have been active participants in the authoritarianism we are seeing today. Republican and Democrat politicians alike deployed militarized police to silence students protesting a genocide. And it was during Biden's term that we saw a reporter violently dragged out of White House press room for asking critical questions about Israel, liberals responded with deafening silence and furthermore demanded the voices speaking out against these abuses to be silent.
Instead of fighting fascism, liberals helped extended the permission structure for repression, giving cover to crimes against humanity. None of us are free until all of us are free, and you can’t tackle these issues in isolation—by race, class, sexuality, or borders. We are interconnected, and until liberals truly internalize that, we’ll keep repeating the same cycles.
Too many liberals still see the U.S. as the “good guy,” believing everything we do overseas is for democracy and liberty, playing a paternal role to countries supposedly incapable of governing themselves. The truth is, we are a fascist empire that will do anything to maintain global dominance—propping up dictators, terrorists, and militias alike. This very worldview that shapes liberals’ geopolitical analysis is inherently racist, nationalist, and deeply biased and reinforced by a mainstream media whose owners profit from maintaining an unequal and exploitative system.
So what do the "No Kings" organizers actually believe in? And are these the people we want leading the so-called Resistance?No Kings was organized by Indivisible, a progressive but pro-Israel group founded by Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg in response to Trump’s 2016 election, along with other organizations and in partnership with 200 groups including Third Act Movement, the American Federation of Teachers, Social Security Works, the Communications Workers of America, the ACLU, Public Citizen, and MoveOn.Ezra Levin told MSNBC:“The time for assessing this administration is over. Now is the moment to raise our voices and be heard—not just to protest this parade, but to affirm something deeper: that power belongs to the people, that democracy is worth defending, that we still believe in a government of, by, and for the people. Inspired by Dr. King’s legacy, this mobilization reminds us of his vision of a just, inclusive, and equitable society.”But as a liberal Zionist, Levin and his partner Greenberg has a glaring blind spot: their support for the ethno-nationalist state of Israel, "No Kings" also has major investment from liberal establishment donors like Walmart heiress Christy Walton, which explains why their messaging stops at “No Kings” instead of something like Bernie’s “Fight Oligarchy.”
Despite that, they’re not the worst actors. While the left has many valid critiques, there isn’t really a coherent ideology behind "No Kings"—for better or worse. There are no explicit top-down bans on pro-Palestine voices, and the coalition has included figures like Bernie Sanders and Mehdi Hasan. Medhi Hasan's speech at the D.C. rally was unapologetically pro-palestine. Although he did end his speech telling people to join the democratic party :/ However, this does show that the "No Kings" political tent is wide enough to allow more radical ideas to coexist — ideas that stand in direct opposition to the corporatist, AIPAC-beholden Democratic Party. Still, the question remains: what happens after we “defeat Trump”? What comes next? A movement like "No Kings" doesn’t have the infrastructure or clarity to offer real direction. Like the Democrats, the rhetoric stops at “Trump is bad.”
Leftists fear things will simply go back to “normal,” and “normal” is exactly what produced Trump. Leftist understand that If we revert to the same political duopoly, we’ll face another fascist threat in a few years. The sad truth is that "No Kings" offers the same hollow cycle that gave us Trump in the first place. The organization is deeply tied to the Democratic Party. At the D.C. rally, establishment figures like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer were fixtures. "No Kings" also uses ActBlue—the party’s fundraising arm. All the emails collected from these events will ultimately be used to send you endless texts from Kamala Harris asking for five more dollars to “finally stop Trump this time.”That reality fuels much of the left’s frustration with these protests. But instead of anger, there’s also an opportunity.These protests alone won’t create the change we need, but they do present a chance to use their resources, reach, and visibility to organize more effectively. We often fall into the trap, especially online, of demanding that those with more power “do better” instead of building our own. I’ve done it too.Before the protest, I reached out to a mutual who volunteers with the "No Kings" communications team, urging them to tell the leadership to use their platform responsibly—to not just mobilize people, but to organize them, to create real defiance that leads to change.They replied: “No Kings are mass mobilizations and great opportunities for visibility and funneling people into local actions. ;) Also, 50501 is not an org, just a group of volunteers helping build resistance.” I wasn’t satisfied. But later, I realized that’s okay. We don’t need to plead with them to do better. We need to show up and make it happen ourselves.
If we’re not there organizing and educating people, exposing them to these truths, the real danger is that the next power vacuum won’t be filled by anyone remotely socialist or revolutionary. It’ll be filled by liberals, centrists, or worse. We’re missing from where the actual people are. We’re missing from the conversations. We can’t just yell into echo chambers online. It’s on us to make sure people are open to something different, whether that’s a third-party candidate or a Marxist revolutionary movement. We have to start earning people’s political imagination now.
Nothing on its own is going to save us. Not "No Kings", not inflatable frogs, not pro-Palestine protests. We need a diversity of tactics, strategies, and people, all working constantly. If Andor taught me anything, it’s that rebellion requires coalitions—radicals, centrists, organizers—all honoring their beliefs but working together toward a shared end. Our job is to make sure there’s enough infrastructure and enough comrades ready to turn our vision of a better society into reality. The "No Kings" protest, for all its flaws, presents an opportunity to start doing exactly that.
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