Why No Kings III Matters, And Why You Need to Be There

Tomorrow, we take to the sidewalks of Canton. This is No Kings III, and I want to tell you exactly why it matters, and why your presence is not optional.

We are not living through ordinary times. We are watching the systematic dismantling of democratic norms, one executive order, one funding freeze, one deported legal resident at a time. We are watching an administration test how far it can go before people push back. The answer to that test is determined, in part, by what happens on sidewalks like the ones we'll be standing on tomorrow.

No Kings is a direct statement of what is at stake. We do not have kings in this country. We have laws, and rights, and a system of government that derives its authority from the consent of the governed. When that system is flouted, when judges are defied, when Congress is circumvented, when officials are fired for doing their jobs, we have a constitutional crisis on our hands. Constitutional crises do not resolve themselves. They resolve when enough people decide they will not be complicit in the resolution.

That is what we are doing tomorrow.

What the historians are telling us

If you want to understand why getting off the couch and showing up on a sidewalk matters, listen to the people who have spent their careers studying how democracies fail.

Timothy Snyder, historian, University of Toronto professor, and author of On Tyranny, has been sounding the alarm since the first Trump term. It is worth noting, parenthetically, that Snyder left Yale last year for Canada. He says his reasons were largely personal. His colleague Jason Stanley said his reasons were entirely political, citing the Trump administration's attacks on universities. Draw your own conclusions. Snyder has pointed out that Americans are not uniquely immune to the failures of democracy, that we are no wiser than the Europeans who watched democracy yield to fascism in the twentieth century. Our one advantage, he argues, is that we can learn from their experience. And what that experience teaches is this: institutions do not protect themselves. As he writes in On Tyranny, they fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning.

Snyder is also clear about what showing up actually does. In his view, getting out to protest is something real and something patriotic, and part of the new authoritarianism is to get people to prefer fiction and inaction to reality and action. Staying home, doomscrolling, convincing yourself nothing you do matters: that is exactly what an authoritarian project needs you to do.

He has also written that protests can be organized through social media, but nothing is real that does not end on the streets. Nothing. Real. That does not end. On the streets. Read that again.

Heather Cox Richardson, the Boston College historian behind Letters from an American and Democracy Awakening, frames the danger in terms that should stop every complacent person cold. Her book opens with the observation that democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint. The fall looks like normalized dysfunction. It looks like people deciding the situation does not quite warrant action yet. It looks like waiting until it is too late.

Ezra Levin, co-executive director of Indivisible, made the point plainly in Richardson's newsletter last fall: authoritarian regimes fear mass organizing and peaceful protest because they reveal a regime's unpopularity and show that it is losing its grip on power. That is what history shows, over and over again. They fear us when we show up. They count on us when we do not.

And Snyder, in one of his most cutting observations, notes that a nationalist will say "it can't happen here," which is the first step toward disaster. The "it can't happen here" crowd is always wrong. They were wrong in Weimar Germany. They have been wrong in every democracy that has slid toward authoritarianism. Do not be that person.

Why Canton?

Because this is not just a Woodstock problem, or an Atlanta problem, or a blue-city problem. Cherokee County has been told, over and over again, that we are a red county, a safe county, a county where people like us should sit down and be quiet. We have been showing up every week to prove otherwise. No Kings III in Canton is us saying: we are here, we are organized, and we are not going away.

We have done this twice before. The energy at No Kings I and No Kings II was undeniable. People who had never been to a protest drove in from across the county, stood on a sidewalk, and felt, maybe for the first time, that they were not alone. That feeling is not a small thing. It is, in fact, the whole thing. Movements are built on the recognition that you are not the only one who sees what's happening.

Why you, specifically, need to show up

I hear the objections. You're tired. You have things to do. You're not sure it makes a difference. You wonder if it's safe.

Here's what I know: movements lose when people decide their individual presence doesn't matter. Movements win when enough people decide to show up anyway. The math is simple. The more people who come, the bigger the statement. The bigger the statement, the harder it is to dismiss us. The harder it is to dismiss us, the more power we have.

You are not just a body on a sidewalk. You are a data point in an argument about whether this community is willing to fight for its own democracy. I want that argument to be settled tomorrow, loudly and visibly, in front of anyone driving down the road who thinks we're not here.

We have also done the safety planning. We coordinated with the ACLU. We know our rights. We have a route, a system, and people who know what to do. You are walking into a well-organized, peaceful demonstration led by people who take your safety seriously.

For the Facebook trolls: yes, we know America technically doesn't have a king

Every time we announce one of these events, someone shows up in the comments to tell us, with the confidence of a person who just discovered Wikipedia, that "America doesn't have a king." Bless your heart.

We know that. That's the point.

"No Kings" is a statement of principle, the same statement of principle that animated the American Revolution. The founders didn't have the word "authoritarianism" in their vocabulary, so they used the language they had. They called unchecked executive power what it was: kingship. And they built an entire system of government specifically to prevent it.

What we are protesting is the functional equivalent of that power. When a president defies court orders and faces no consequence, that is kingly behavior. When inspectors general are fired in the middle of the night, that is kingly behavior. When political opponents are targeted with criminal investigations while allies receive pardons, that is kingly behavior. When a man declares that he will decide which laws his administration will follow and which it will ignore, that is, to use the technical term, kingly behavior. Power exercised without accountability has a name, and the founders gave it one.

And here's what the trolls might want to sit with: the "it can't happen here, we don't have a king" argument is precisely what Snyder warned about. "Post-truth is pre-fascism," he writes. The people most certain that American institutions will protect themselves are the people who have never bothered to understand how fragile those institutions actually are. The mistake, Snyder argues, is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions, even when that is exactly what they have announced they will do.

We're out here making sure it doesn't happen here. You're welcome to join us.

What happens if we don't show up

Staying home sends a signal. It tells the people in power, and the people watching from the sidelines, that nothing is wrong, that there is no cost to what is happening, that Cherokee County is asleep or complicit. I refuse to let that be the story.

Every No Kings event we have held has built on the last one. We are building something here: a visible, persistent, organized opposition in a county that the political establishment assumed was safe. Every person who shows up tomorrow makes it a little harder to ignore us, a little harder to dismiss what we are doing, a little harder to pretend that the people of Cherokee County are uniformly okay with kings.

The details

No Kings III is tomorrow, Saturday, March 28. We are hitting the sidewalks in Canton. If you have questions about timing, location, or what to bring, check here.

Bring a sign. Bring a friend. Bring your anger, your grief, your love for this country, and your refusal to give up on it.

We'll see you out there.