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’ve done it for my area, yes. It’s called being an informed voter.
Unfortunately, one person making informed voting decisions isn’t enough. Everyone needs to do it for it to work, or at least enough to reach critical mass. That’s an intrinsic part of how democracy works.
You’re choosing to be a part of the problem by rejecting the democratic process as a whole, and thus you have no standing to complain when it doesn’t go the way you want.
As someone who puts in the effort to make informed choices and actually votes, it would be perfectly reasonable for me to complain when things don’t go the way I want. And believe me, I’ve had my share of complaints about fascism.
But it’s also perfectly reasonable for me to complain about people who do nothing, stand idly by and don’t do the research, make misinformed voting decisions that harm themselves and others in the long run, or don’t vote at all; even worse, people who discourage others from voting as well.
So I’ll continue calling out that behavior, just like I’ll continue calling out fascism. And I’ll continue to encourage people to make informed voting decisions, and to run for office themselves if there’s no candidate they can get behind.
If you don’t like that, then you can go live somewhere voting isn’t an option. We won’t miss you. Some of us still want to preserve that option here, and are still trying, even when the odds look stacked against us.
If you want to give up and cry about it, do it somewhere else where your contagion doesn’t spread, because if your doomerism catches on then we’ll really lose all hope. Stop trying to infect the minds of others.
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Lol.
If you’re not nihilistic about the system at this point you’re either a Pollyanna level of naive or nowhere near as informed as you think you are. Whichever it is, wishing that everyone voted exactly the same way you do isn’t going to change anything, no matter how passionately you shout into the echo chamber about it.
I’m plenty cynical about the way things are, but I won’t succumb to nihilism and we don’t need you spreading it either.
Feel free to call me self-righteous. I don’t care, because I know that’s projection. My point is “everyone needs to do their part in order to maintain a functioning democracy.” Yours is that “everyone should give up because things are already broken.”
Notice that I never did that. I said everyone need to make informed voting decisions, and I explained the process for how to do that. I even refused to answer your question when you asked me to tell you who to vote for. So you can take that strawman and shove it up your ass.
You’re also using the term echo chamber wrong. An echo chamber is an insulated group that all share the same opinion and reflect their own confirmation biases back at each other. That’s not what this is. I’m clearly arguing with someone I disagree with, who also disagrees with me. That’s not a fucking echo chamber.
But if you want to spread your doomerism and nihility, and discourage any discussion on the topic in spaces of the internet where people still have the freedom to discuss it, then that just convinces me that you’re a troll posing as dissent in order to discourage opposition.
Some of the takes on here are quite unhinged… Thanks for fighting the good fight.
It gets pretty exhausting, especially on some of the threads from after the No Kings protest. It’s like all the trolls received their marching orders and emerged from their slumber to astroturf these posts with doomerism.
Thanks for your comment, it’s always encouraging to hear I’m not the only one. That’s why I won’t leave others hanging in similar situations.
Detractors want us to shut up about it, because then we’re isolated and powerless. Let’s not give them what they want.
I’ll always be fighting right here next to you sibbling, and I think the majority of actual people who are living under these circumstances agree.