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America Needs a Mass Movement—Now | Without one, America may sink into autocracy for decades.
(www.theatlantic.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2025
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#NOKINGS This Saturday, find your local protest: https://www.nokings.org/#map
Mobilization is not organization. Those in power already know the people are dissatisfied. They dont care. None of us are doing enough to make it their problem. We do not have the spaces to organize the kinds of actions that would be effective. Even this platform is not safe enough to talk about what needs to be done. It is too late. They won.
There are ways to evade them. There is more happening than you see in the media.
Sure, but cells of disruptive activists are not the foundations of a nationally effective movement. You need a way for normies to show up and help. And placating their activist impulses with a demonstration of discontent while not also offering real channels for affecting change is a way of castrating collective action. That's my two cents, at least.
The resistance has many fronts... I'm not sure what you are missing. The last #NOKINGS protest was the largest protest in American history. I personally was there in my city. You pick the type of person and they were there. Old, young, conservative, religious, whatever, I met all kinds of folks from all walks of life. That's what this is all about.
Protests that are legal, time-limited, and non-disruptive while also having no specific demands are just angry parades. And while it can be personally cathartic to be around like minded people, this does literally nothing to affect material change. Instead, millions of people who were motivated to engage in political action have now spent a couple of hours walking around, chanting, reading signs made by others, have let off some of the built up pressure that might have otherwise motivated them to do something real. Imagine if 1% of the protestors who turned out yesterday blocked access to ICE facilities instead? Or donated time and money to feeding homeless people. Or donated time and money to helping immigrants (documented and otherwise) increase access to legal services. Imagine if instead everyone of those people decided to strike from their jobs until the shutdown was ended and healthcare funded indefinitely? My ideas are not the best ones out there, but they are all probably more impactful to real people than anything that happened yesterday.
Conversely, how many more brown people were disappeared off the streets by ICE while everyone was distracted with the no kings protest? What new, corrupt, immoral, expenditure of our tax dollars was allocated to some horrible imperialist cause or Trump ally? How many people who depend on govt services had to go without because the shutdown was in place? You get the idea.
Effective protest is disruptive, time-unbounded, and usually illegal. They always have specific demands like ending a war, passing a bill, or freeing the unjustly imprisoned, etc. I am glad that people were motivated to turn out. I am sad that they turned out for an angry parade.