Mother Jones illustration; Jason Whitman/NurPhoto/AP, Violeta Alvarez/AP, Michael Nigro/Sipa USA/AP
This Saturday’s “No Kings” protests, at thousands of sites around the country, are expected to draw huge numbers of demonstrators fed up with the constitutional overreach and autocratic drift of President Donald Trump’s administration. But according to some of the most powerful Republicans in Washington, something more nefarious is at work.
“This is part of antifa, paid protesters,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told Fox News. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson called it the “Hate America Rally” and claimed that it would feature “pro-Hamas” and “antifa people.” It was a “small but very violent and vocal group,” said Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota. Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall warned that “Soros-paid…professional protestors” would be taking to the streets. “Hopefully it will be peaceful—I doubt it.”
No Kings organizers and participants I spoke with this week, from leaders of major national organizations to retired volunteers at small local groups, have responded to the intensifying rhetoric from the right-wing with a mix of incredulity and resolve.
“The initial reaction was visceral laughter, when I first saw it, and the second reaction was, gosh Mike, thanks for the free publicity,” said Ezra Levin, a co-founder of Indivisible, a lead organizer of the weekend event, of Johnson’s comments. “It’s funny that he knows that the phrase ‘No Kings’ is so unobjectionable that if you watch him talk now he just twists himself into knots to not say that.”
But Levin’s third reaction, he said, was more serious. This was, after all, a ruling political party attempting to undercut the freedom of assembly because it feared the imagery such peaceful assemblies might produce. At the last No Kings rally in June, Levin noted, he and his wife—Indivisible’s co-founder, Leah Greenberg—led a crowd of 100,000 in Philadelphia in the Pledge of Allegiance.
“Any authoritarian regime is scared of one thing more than anything else, which is peaceful mass people power,” he said, because it challenges the idea “that they are entirely in control and hold the cards.”
For Republican officials, it’s easier to assert that the resistance they’re facing is coming from a shadowy fifth column, than to grapple with the fact that millions of ordinary people are so fed up. But it’s still a deeply strange assertion to anyone with a passing familiarity with Indivisible, an organization that began after the 2016 election as a simple Google Doc on how Trump opponents could pressure their elected representatives. (A 2020 Atlantic story on one group of suburban activists who had made use of Indivisible’s guide was titled “Revenge of the Wine Moms.”) But of course Levin was going to say this wasn’t all part of a plot to burn down American cities. So I called up some other organizers.
“We have 1.8 million members in the AFT—I’m sure somebody’s gonna say to me that someone of the 1.8 million members subscribes to that philosophy but there is no organizing within the AFT on behalf of anything that’s called ‘Antifa’ that I’ve ever seen,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers—which, not to belabor the point, is a union consisting of teachers.
A volunteer for another partner organization, Mennonite Action—“a movement of Mennonites, Christians, and friends”—said in an email that the group was holding 40 training sessions around the country this month on subjects such as “Nonviolent Action 101,” and “faith based non-cooperation in the authoritarian moment.”
“I suppose if that makes us anti-fascist, the label applies,” the volunteer said. It might—but if your definition of a violent mob includes well-organized Mennonites, that says more about you.
Other partner organizations include the Center for Biological Diversity, which is currently running a petition to save sea turtles, and National Nurses United, a union representing, you guessed it, nurses. “You are clearly seeing people resisting what’s happening and how it’s affecting them in their everyday lives,” said Cathy Kennedy, NNU’s president.
When I spoke with Greg Broyles, a member of an Indivisible group in Roanoke, Virginia, which is listed as one of more than 200 partners for No Kings, he seemed mystified by the way Republicans were characterizing protestors.
“To compare Indivisible to antifa is going to make antifa just laugh their bellies off,” he said. “We have people in our group who don’t want to use offensive wording on our signage.”
Broyles is a 63-year-old former Marine and a semi-retired real-estate investor. And a disproportionate number of his group’s members are older residents like him.
“To say that there’s some sort of conspiracy of left-wing groups is absurd—it just means you haven’t operated in a left-wing space,” he said Just like people say, well, academics all conspire together. You obviously never sat in a room with a room full of professors! It’s just a ridiculous aspersion that’s being cast by the right on the left. All we are are people who want to raise our families and also enjoy the welfare state that we agreed to participate in.”
Other local leaders who are partnering on the protests said their groups skewed older too. “We have time, we can meet—that’s kind of how it is with a lot of things in this town,” said Lisa Swanson, who retired from the US Postal Service and now volunteers with Morgan County Indivisible in the West Virginia panhandle town of Berkeley Springs. Mary Beth Furman, who retired to Scottsdale four years ago after a career in marketing and who now writes the newsletter for her group Stand Indivisible Arizona, said that “If you come to any of our protests, it’s a bunch of old grandmas and grandpas and dogs.”
Furman’s group describes itself as non-partisan and engages in a lot of activities that aren’t political at all. They hold food drives and collect shoes. One of the group’s next events is a letter-writing campaign. “We’re gonna write thank-you notes to the institutions that are doing a good job, that we support, that are doing good things—we want them to know we recognize you, keep it up” she said. (She wasn’t sure yet who would fit the bill—naturally, another committee was planning the meetup.)
But these are the sorts of people the Speaker of the House and other prominent Washington Republicans are accusing of being affiliated with “antifa”—which the White House, in turn, has accused of domestic terrorism.
For Indivisible groups and other organizations participating in big protests, de-escalation is the name of the game, as they push to pro-actively avoid anything that would even give a passing resemblance to disorder. Hunter Dunn, a national spokesperson for another No Kings partner, 50501, said organizers have been “training tens of thousands of volunteers in de-escalation and community care,” both through online and in-person sessions. Levin noted that all No Kings events are required to have a safety plan in place.
Furman, whose group has held de-escalation trainings and promoted similar events from the ACLU (another No Kings partner which is, again, not antifa), preaches a zen-like mantra to her fellow group members when a driver of truck flips them off: “If nobody sees the finger does the finger really exist?”
Still, organizers view the rhetoric as a clear act of intimidation, from a movement helmed by a man who once sicced a mob against Congress itself. They’re on guard for right-wing agitators attempting to create a scene, and are conscious of the fact that some of the cities they’ll be marching in—including Chicago and Portland—are currently crawling with federal agents.
“They want to take us off our message, and they want to take us off what the point is, which is that there are millions of people in America that do not like what’s going on right now,” Weingarten said. “They may have really different policies, differences from me or my union or other educators or other people in the labor movement, but where we come together is that we should all have a right to govern ourselves through a democracy—not through this push to disappear people, to militarize our streets, to hate someone’s opponents to the point that they would abuse the power of the government to go against people who they disagree with.”
To organizers, these accusations of violence and sinister conspiracies are cause for caution and planning, but they’re also sort of the point. It’s not called the No Mild-Mannered Republicans protest, after all. If they weren’t so concerned about lawlessness and intimidation and extra-constitutional methods, they wouldn’t be marching at all.
