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From Tom Paine in 1776 to Main Street in 2025: No Kings! [1]
['John Nichols', 'David Klion', 'Elie Mystal', 'Samuel Moyn', 'Steve Brodner', 'Tracy Rosenthal', 'Joan Walsh', 'Peter Kuper', 'Chris Lehmann', 'Jeet Heer']
Date: 2025-06-13 09:00:00+00:00
Politics / From Tom Paine in 1776 to Main Street in 2025: No Kings! Americans have a right to assemble and a right to petition for the redress of grievances. They will use those rights this weekend to resist Trumpism.
A statue of Thomas Paine in Paris. (Joe Sohm / Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Across the United States on Saturday—from Monument Square in Concord, Massachusetts, to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama; from the Town Square in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to Travis Park near the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas; from 26 miles above the Arctic Circle in Kotzebue, Alaska, to La Fortaleza in San Juan, Puerto Rico; from the Fergus County Courthouse on Main Street in Lewistown, Montana (population: 5,952), to City Hall in downtown Los Angeles, California (population: 3,899,449)—millions of Americans will parade and picket, rally and peacefully protest as part of the nationwide No Kings! mobilization against the abuses of power perpetrated by President Trump and his increasingly lawless administration.
An estimated 1,800 demonstrations will take place on what organizers with the 50901 movement, Indivisible, and other groups believe will be one of the biggest and boldest days of dissent in American history.
The No Kings! message resonates deep in the heart of our national identity, extending from some of the oldest understandings of the American experiment. At its best, that experiment has always been about more than the rejection of a single monarch: England’s King George III. It’s been about standing up to any ruler who crowns himself, in the words of Tom Paine, as “the principle ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners, or pre-eminence in subtilty obtained him the title of chief among plunderers.”
While Trump will mount a princely display of his own in Washington on Saturday, with a military parade on what happens to be his 79th birthday, the No Kings! movement says: “On June 14th, we’re showing up everywhere he isn’t—to say no thrones, no crowns, no kings.”
While “President Trump wants tanks in the street and a made-for-TV display of dominance for his birthday—a spectacle meant to look like strength,” the No Kings! mobilization argues, “Real power isn’t staged in Washington. It rises up everywhere else.”
To that end, No Kings! marchers plan to tell Trump and the president’s allies, “We’re not gathering to feed his ego. We’re building a movement that leaves him behind…a nationwide day of defiance. From city blocks to small towns, from courthouse steps to community parks, we’re taking action to reject authoritarianism—and show the world what democracy really looks like.”
One of the largest of the No Kings rallies is expected to begin in Philadelphia’s Love Park, where patriots plan to gather just blocks from the hall where the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, and not far from the historical marker that recalls, “At his print shop here, Robert Bell published the first edition of Thomas Paine’s revolutionary pamphlet in January 1776. Arguing for a republican form of government under a written constitution, it played a key role in rallying American support for independence.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/no-kings-protests-preview-guide/
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