Will No Kings 3 turn into the biggest anti-war protest ever?
It is a war only a mad king would launch, and only a mad king would love
The list of grievances that fall under the banner of “No Kings 3” is, by necessity, a long one.
Each of the millions of protesters who will rally in over 3,000 locations across the country on Saturday, March 28, will be adding their voice to a massive, collective roar of defiance. But their chants and their signs will reflect the wide range of resistance to tyranny.
Many will focus on Trump’s abuse of power, his undermining of the rule of law, and the cover-up of the Epstein files. Others will decry his attacks on human rights, civil rights, and voting rights. Immigration will be a huge issue -- both Trump’s mass-deportation agenda and the murderous ICE invasion of American cities. Some will call attention to his gutting of the government, his cossetting of his fellow oligarchs, and his regressive environmental policies.
But No Kings 3 is, unexpectedly, taking place in a time of war. It is a war only a mad king would launch, and only a mad king would love.
Trump attacked Iran, unprovoked, based on his “feelings”. He bypassed Congress, which is the only branch of government the Constitution vests with the authority to declare war. He is now bombing people and sinking boats “for fun.” His announced goals are incoherent and contradictory and ever-changing. He makes apocalyptic threats and then withdraws them. His is spoon-fed cherry-picked news by his acolytes.
And now we appear to be mired in a war that is costing the lives of servicemembers, killing innocent people, terrorizing entire populations, destabilizing the globe, tanking the economy, and arguably strengthening Iran’s own tyrannical regime.
The American public overwhelmingly opposes the war – by a 65 to 31 margin, according to a recent poll – driving Trump’s overall approval level down to 36 percent.
There’s been remarkably little anti-war outcry so far. But that could all change on Saturday.
The message, I hope, will be clear: That this war must end now, and that this deranged man must be stopped.
No Kings 3 will almost certainly be the largest one-day political protest in U.S. history. It might also turn out to be the largest anti-war protest the country has ever seen.
Come Out and Bring a Friend
There is, I feel safe in saying, a No Kings 3 event somewhere near you. You can find one here.
Molly Lee, a maker of handcrafted soap in Portland, has posted nine delightful Facebook reels encouraging attendance, including this one, titled “No Kings for beginners.”
And don’t let your participation in the resistance end when you go home. MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow had a rousing segment on No Kings 3 on her Monday show. It included an interview with Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin, who told her: “The day after No Kings, democracy won’t suddenly be saved. Trump will still be in the White House. This illegal and unconstitutional war will still be going on. His secret police force goon squad will still be terrorizing American communities.”
Levin continued: “So we need to build. This is why it’s important to be organizing where you are… to start organizing your own community for what comes next.”
The flagship No Kings 3 rally will be held in St. Paul, Minnesota. The lineup includes Bernie Sanders, Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, Keith Ellison – and Bruce Springsteen.
Springsteen will perform his new protest song, “Streets of Minneapolis,” which includes these lyrics:
We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
Here in our home they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
I hope he also does “War”:
War, huh
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing
Say it again
Why You Should Go
“I hope you will join in. Everything is at stake,” writes University of Toronto professor and tyranny expert Timothy Snyder. He continues:
Protest changes the atmosphere. For authoritarians to win, they need their supporters to be active, the majority to be silent, and their actions to seem normal. Protest shows that their supporters are in the minority, that the majority will not be silent, and that it is the people who set the standards….
Protest wins elections. In the situation that we are in now, the opposition must win elections to halt the shift to a one-person, one-party authoritarian regime. And although these elections will be difficult, they can be won. But winning them means building a big, active coalition, of which the opposition party is just one part. Protestors are another part. The groups we build together are what make the difference.
Protest brings joy. It feels good to be active and to be with other people. It dispels the loneliness we might experience when we are alone or online. When we realize that we are with millions of others, we feel we can make a difference, because we are making a difference: in the world, and in ourselves.
Activist and former labor secretary Robert Reich writes that on Saturday, “we will proclaim our refusal to submit. We will march against this vile regime in larger numbers than have ever protested in America.” He continues:
This alone won’t bring down Trump, of course, but it will show lawmakers on both sides of the aisle the breadth and depth of the opposition to him. This is essential to strengthening their backbones against him.
It will also show each of us that we’re not alone. It will show hope and determination all around us.
Daniel Hunter, the co-founder of Choose Democracy, was the guest on this week’s episode of the National Catholic Reporter’s “The Nonviolent Jesus Podcast.” “This is a good moment,” Hunter said. “We’re getting ready to take on the biggest supervillain the world has ever seen. Every action, everything we’re doing — it’s all adding up right now.”
Home of the Brave, a group largely made up of never-Trumpers, says they have spent $1 million to place this full-page ad in 300 newspapers around the country.
What Comes Next?
There’s a call tonight to prepare for the next big event, on May 1: the May Day Strong “After No Kings” Mass Call starts at 8 p.m. ET.
May 1 comes on a Friday this year. Organizers are calling for “no school, no work, no shopping” to “demand a nation that puts workers over billionaires.”
There’s also a call next Tuesday, March 31, about “What’s Next After No Kings 3?”
Speakers will discuss the importance of local organizing to prepare for the midterms – to protect the vote and vote out Republicans – as well as monitoring ICE in your community, mutual aid, and other activities.
This Week in the Courts
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., enjoined the Pentagon from enforcing a new policy that effectively banished real journalists in favor of those “willing to publish only stories that are favorable to or spoon-fed by department leadership.” Judge Paul L. Friedman wrote: “A primary purpose of the First Amendment is to enable the press to publish what it will and the public to read what it chooses, free of any official proscription. Those who drafted the First Amendment believed that the nation’s security requires a free press and an informed people and that such security is endangered by governmental suppression of political speech. That principle has preserved the nation’s security for almost 250 years. It must not be abandoned now.”
A federal judge in Massachusetts granted a motion to block a new Trump administration policy that mandated the warrantless arrest and potentially indefinite detention of lawfully admitted refugees. HIAS argued in an amicus brief that “Because refugees are already subjected to an exhaustive vetting process, and because those who have already arrived in the United States are deeply involved in rebuilding their lives and recovering from persecution and displacement, it is unwarranted, costly, unnecessary, inefficient, and extraordinarily cruel to arrest and detain them to conduct additional screenings.”
Minnesota state and county officials sued DOJ and DHS for blocking their investigations into the shooting by federal agents in January of Renee Good, Alex Pretti and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. Good and Pretti were killed, Sosa-Celis was injured. The suit alleges that in at least one case, the decision to stonewall local investigators “was made at the highest levels of DOJ.” The suit says that Minnesota courts issued search warrants for evidence related to Good’s death, including one for her car, but the FBI won’t let them near it.
Two former FBI agents sued to get their jobs back after being fired last year for having worked on an investigation that led to Trump’s indictment for election interference. “Plaintiffs’ terminations were unlawful because they were based on a perception that Plaintiffs were not political supporters of President Trump,” the suit alleges.
I take great succor from the court cases I’ve chronicled here on Heads Up News. But Duncan Hosie, a legal scholar at Stanford, writes in a New York Times op-ed that “The Courts Cannot Save Us From Trump.”
“Placing too much faith in the courts in this moment mistakes litigation for resistance,” Hosie writes. “It risks obscuring the greater importance of the political battlefields where the most significant opposition to the administration’s constitutional abuses can and should take place.”
No to Concentration Camps
NPR has published a fabulous resource for those who want to protest ICE facilities or want to learn about those protests: “Mapping ICE’s expanding footprint, and the communities fighting back.”
The state of Michigan and the city of Romulus sued to block the conversion of a suburban Detroit warehouse into an immigration detention center. “DHS’s plan has thrown the Romulus community into disarray,” the suit says.
The state of New Jersey and the town of Roxbury sued to block the conversion of a warehouse there into a 1,500-person immigration detention center. The warehouse is fit for “packages, not people,” the suit says.
In Evanston, Illinois, on Friday, interfaith ministers and others announced their campaign to stop Chicago real estate firm Highlands REIT from contracting for an immigration center in Colorado.
Protesters gathered outside Utah Gov. Spencer Cox’s mansion on Tuesday to protest an immigration center planned for a Salt Lake City warehouse.
One possible attack vector for protesters is how wildly ICE is overpaying for its warehouses. ICE bought the massive Salt Lake City warehouse at a price that one local industrial expert told the Building Salt Lake website was “unheard of.” The broker said the price for such buildings is typically between $100 and $110 per square foot, while ICE paid around $174 per square foot.
I previously noted that it was a mystery why DHS bought a massive warehouse in Social Circle, Georgia, outside Atlanta, for $129 million -- $100 million more than the $29 million purchase price in 2003.
Cui bono?
See you on Saturday!