The Ridiculous No Kings Protest 2.0 Exposed
by David Catron, The American Spectator, October 19, 2025
It’s difficult to think of a more effective way to illustrate the moral and intellectual emptiness of the American left than to have them march around demanding an end to an institution our founding fathers abolished 250 years ago. This is how the official “No Kings” website described what happened on Saturday: “On October 18, more than seven million of us rose up at more than 2,700 events in all 50 states, DC, and cities worldwide to say: America has no kings, and the power belongs to the people.” These folks are a little late to the party, as Thomas Jefferson would probably point out were he still with us.
What they are actually protesting, of course, has nothing to do with kings. It’s just another mass outbreak of Trump Derangement Syndrome. As Brit Hume phrases it on X, “The ‘No Kings’ rallies are mostly a protest against a man who sought power three times through democratic elections and enacted his major agenda item by majority vote of democratically elected members of Congress. Some King.”
Batya Ungar-Sargon expands on his point as follows: “The Left isn’t protesting a king but their fellow Americans. They aren’t standing up for democracy — they are protesting against it.” They seem to have forgotten that Donald Trump was democratically elected less than one year ago with a popular majority.
The Babylon Bee, as it frequently does, captured the true essence of No Kings and the intellectual capacity of the protestors: “Millions of Americans took to the streets today in order to express to the world their total and absolute ignorance about the political system they live in. Several major cities including Boston, New York City, and Chicago saw over one hundred thousand residents show up to proclaim their abject incomprehension of governance.” This is funny, of course, but it is also quite dangerous.
Can you imagine getting up and getting dressed — and then heading out to a protest and then not have a clue about what you’re protesting 🤔
— Erica 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@EricaRN4USA) October 19, 2025
These people are indoctrinated by .@TheDemocrats and under the spell of the biased media. pic.twitter.com/G8glex5LhI
When this many people are this clueless they are very easily manipulated, as Roger Kimball patiently explains in a column for American Greatness:
In nearby Westport, terminally disgruntled middle-to-late-aged citizens, joined by clumps of unattractive GenZeers — Geezers and Zeers — regularly congregate on a certain bridge to protest for or against whatever the central committee has handed down as this week’s issue: climate change, fossil fuels, Brett Kavanaugh, Israel, etc. Whatever the announced issue is, they are there with their signs, their self-righteousness, their ire … Naturally, the crowds were out in force today to disrupt traffic and inform the world that they abominate Donald Trump and all his works.
The point here is that these ridiculous people aren’t doing their own thinking. Instead, they are following the lead of the leftist organizers of No Kings, including Communist Party USA, the Young Communist League, the Democratic Socialists of America, Antifa, Indivisible, MoveOn, ad infinitum. Countless X posters went to the protests and asked people why they were protesting President Trump. Most answers were just dumb: “I don’t know. We don’t like him. That’s the word around here.” Others were more sinister. This man ironically advocated the use of gun violence: “You gotta grab a gun, we gotta turn around the guns on this fascist system.”
He was by no means the only person who advocated violence. Here’s a protestor carrying a sign asking “WOULD YOU LIKE TO KILL NAZIS W ME.” When asked to name a specific Nazi, he answered, “Stephen Miller.” When asked if he would kill Miller, he answered, “If I had the chance, yea I would.” Here’s Connecticut State Senator Saud Anwar (D), a physician from Pakistan, holding up a sign at a No Kings protest that seems to refer to Trump’s recent physical: “CHOLESTEROL, DO YOUR JOB.” So, who are these people? Breitbart News reports what NBC-10 Boston reporter Sue O’Connell noticed about the people who took part in the No Kings protests:
There’s not a lot of folks, and granted, it’s a big crowd here, I’m not good at estimating, but it’s definitely over 2000, maybe close to 3000. We can’t see everyone, but it’s an older crowd, a lot of white hair you see out there, Q-tips, as we used to call them in the business. They are out protesting, and not a lot of young people. And also, again, portraying this I hate America idea that this is what this protest is about, showing people who are Boomers and middle-aged out taking time from their day on a Saturday to come and protest and be heard at the nation’s oldest public park.
O’Connell is referring to Boston Common, if that isn’t obvious, but the way she describes these people tells us far more about their motives than does their location. As PJ Media’s Eric Florack quips, “Based on appearances, the protest organizers must have raided every bingo hall they could find in every reliably leftist city in the country … I suppose many viewed it as a last fling for the Woodstock generation.” Florack is definitely on to something here. There are millions of baby boomers claiming to have been at Woodstock, a music festival attended by a maximum of 500,000 people. They very likely “remember” protesting “the war” as well.
Click Here to Watch/Listen to the Newest We the People Convention Weekly News & Opinion Podcast!
The good news is that most baby boomers aren’t this pathetic. Nor is the Gen Z cohort of the population. The 2024 election demonstrated that fact pretty convincingly. The vast majority of the people “protesting Trump” on Saturday are just TDS victims. No one believes that President Trump aspires to be a king or a dictator. That is really just a DNC talking point that will be used as an excuse to impeach Trump if the Democrats have a majority in the House after the 2026 midterms. The “No Kings” protests are part of a larger psyop designed to prepare the public for that contingency. The whole spectacle was astroturfed and utterly ridiculous.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE NEWS AT SPECTATOR.ORG
Taking Stock of the Astro-Turf 'No Kings' Protests by the Numbers
I’m also seeing reports from folks on the ground that many were well-rewarded for their efforts, with most reports indicating $300 to $500 for the day. I’ll leave to others the task of documenting where, exactly, that money came from and, for that matter, how the tax situation was handled. It should be noted that not all of them were paid. I guess they simply wanted to be involved with something larger than themselves. It does leave me wondering how small you need to be to have something like this measure larger than you are.
According to what we're being told, the job included being bussed in, carrying a pre-made sign for a couple of miles for the sake of the cameras, and then being bussed out again, in some cases to another location to march there. When you’re thin on marchers, it’s what you need to do, I suppose, to generate a multiplicity of those impressive-looking pictures in the news tomorrow. The result of all that effort being that, again, we don’t have any kings. Now, of course, we didn’t have any kings day before yesterday, either, but it’s best not to dwell on such minutiae. So, great job, all. You got what you wanted.
Oh, and in Times Square, the crowd dispersed at exactly 1 p.m. All of them. Yeah, strictly a grassroots effort, that. Given the relative age of the protesters, I can only assume that they all left at that time because the Golden Girls marathon was on at three. Or perhaps they were due to appear on the bridges over the Cross Bronx. Anyway, for that effort, they got what they wanted. We still don’t have any kings. Yeah, great job.
I didn’t get up to nearby Rochester, but I hear from friends in the area that the same thing happened in the downtown area there. In that situation, they packed up and “organically" moved on to one of the 'burbs to march there.
Click Here to Donate to Support the Mission of the We the People Convention!
How many people went to this farce? I did gather a few examples before I went to bed last night. NBC reports that there were some 3,000 marching in Boston, a city of about 676,000 people. That's 0.443% of the good people of Boston deciding to participate. In Huntsville, Alabama, a city of about 300,000 people, they managed to gather up around 1,200 for their performance. Uh, folks, my admittedly rusty math tells me they got around 0.4% of that city's population too. Reports from other cities that I checked were of a similar paltry nature, usually smaller in percentage, even, than these examples.
Pulling back for a broader view doesn't help those numbers. The immensely, reliably accurate NBC reports that the "No Kings" organizers claimed to have gathered up the impressive sounding number of around 7 million marchers nationwide. I’m not going to impugn the honesty of the organizers by suggesting they pulled that number out of thin air, so let’s go with what we are given:
At the last census, the population of the kingdom—err sorry, the country—was 347 million people. Not including illegals of course. So that 7 million they managed to scrape up constitutes around 2% of the population. Indeed the only places they got any kind of serious crowds were in the deepest of deep-blue cities. The rest of the country seemingly declined the invitation to look like an idiot for the cameras. And those figures make the assumption that the protesters were all legally in the country. I think we have a really good working definition for performative protests.
