Anarchists at the No Kings Rallies
:Reports from around the Country
Following the “No Kings, No Masters” call to establish an anti-authoritarian presence at the October 18 “No Kings” rallies around the United States, we reached out to anarchists in a dozen cities and towns to learn how their efforts went and how they understand the challenges and potential of these protests.
Many of the official organizers of the No Kings demonstrations are passionately invested in emphasizing that they are peaceful and law-abiding. At the same time, federal agencies are making a point of displaying their brutality and disregard for legal precedent, while steadily amassing more resources with which to harm communities and suppress opposition. Absent a concrete plan to address the fact that Donald Trump clearly does not intend to leave office voluntarily, the focus on symbolic, legalistic, and inconsequential protest can only be self-defeating.
To rise to the challenge posed by ascendant fascism, the movement against Trump’s power grab will have to find concrete ways to exert leverage, likely including the tactics and strategies that anarchists have developed. Far from frightening away participants, this will draw in those who tend to remain aloof from struggles until there is something substantial at stake—including many of the poorest and most oppressed, who participated in the George Floyd revolt but have largely stayed on the sidelines during the No Kings protests thus far.
Despite the desire of many No Kings organizers to remain innocuous, Donald Trump and his supporters are determined to portray them as crazed extremists. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise called No Kings a “hate America rally.” House Speaker Mike Johnson described the participants as “Hamas supporters,” “antifa types,” and “Marxists,” while House Majority Whip Tom Emmer described them as representing “the terrorist wing” of the Democratic Party, a “small but very violent and vocal group.” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told Fox News “This is part of antifa, paid protesters.” All of this is laughably mendacious, but it should drive home to Democrats that they will gain nothing whatsoever from attempting to show how peaceful and compliant they are. Trump and his lackeys aim to intimidate them into passivity—but regardless of how passive they are, the administration intends to treat them as terrorists.
Let extreme-right grifters and Donald Trump himself charge that the No Kings protesters are “antifa,” or, contradictorily, that anarchists are attempting to infiltrate the No Kings demonstrations. Their very claims will undermine the credibility of those talking points in the eyes of the general public, while compelling millions of people to ask themselves whether they, too, are indeed anti-fascists who should avail themselves of the lessons of the long tradition of anti-authoritarian resistance. There are already signs that this is happening.
The anecdotes below, taken from a variety of contexts across the country, show the beginnings of anarchist participation in a movement that must expand and intensify if we are to avert collective disaster.
Account I: A Small City
A group fluctuating between five and ten people with a banner, a flyer, and a couple of megaphones managed to reroute and lead the largest march I’ve ever seen in the mid-size urban sprawl of [location redacted]. I’m not sure how large the march was; it was definitely massive by local standards, probably in the thousands, an order of magnitude larger than what we saw in 2020, as it completely surrounded a park with a circumference of over three miles.
At first, we marched by ourselves on the streets next to Indivisible’s sidewalk marchers, skirting various interactions with peace police telling us to get off the road. “If a crowd is larger than 100 people, we’re allowed to take one lane” worked fine. We gradually assembled a large enough contingent to stop at an intersection, then turned around to march against the direction of the slithering circular sidewalk march. As a consequence, pretty much anyone under 60 (and some brave elders), including many with pro-“Antifa” signs and a couple One Piece flags, wound up taking the streets in a massive angry march that defied protest marshals. Friendly scooters and motorcyclists spontaneously protected the rear. We stopped at intersections to deliver our messaging over the megaphones and invite the crowd to follow up with us by attending an event we had organized ahead of time (see flyer). Marching through downtown with little to no police presence, having left the peace police behind us, even one or two people who had prepared properly could have gotten away with a lot more and perhaps kicked off something historic. But this intervention—the first one in a long time in which I have seen protesters successfully perform something akin to a breakout march—is a harbinger of things to come.
The video shows how it started and then how it went. The photos show the flyer we distributed and read over the megaphone and the zine table we set up at the park, minus all the donuts, water, and masks that we distributed.
A lot of folks seem very hesitant about engaging with people outside of the movement right now. I think that’s a mistake. The fascists have crashed the economy, systematically alienated every demographic except Twitter nazis, and destroyed the legitimacy of federal law enforcement, the media, the Supreme Court, and both political parties. People are furious, scared, and looking for answers. In many ways, it is the ideal environment for anarchists, but we have to be willing to step outside of our comfort zone, openly and proudly advocate for our ideals, and take some risks trusting ordinary people. More importantly, the last nine months have shown that no one is coming to save us. If we don’t rise to meet the moment—not just anarchists, but all the dispossessed people who oppose fascism—it could very well cost us our lives.
That’s why I went to the rally. I wanted to let other rebels know that they aren’t alone, that there are other ways to resist besides toothless liberal marches, that we don’t need to wait for permission from some national organization to take action.
Account II: A Large Town
I attended the No Kings rally here because comrades had helped organize it, and because it was the best local space I could imagine for meeting other people who want to organize, resist, and fight back.
50501 is basically just a meme backed up by some signal threads and facebook groups. It’s extremely diverse politically and many anarchist and communist friends have been involved locally and in the statewide “structure.” I literally don’t know what it means to say that a network this loose works with police or Democrats; that just means that some figures within it (whether important or minor) have done so, but that doesn’t reflect a collective agreement endorsing that behavior. Under these circumstances, I think we should avoid generalized accusations, and instead just push the political average away from police collaboration or dependence on the Democrats.
The risks were close to nil. A lot of paranoid rumors spread in the days beforehand; comrades worked to debunk those and to reassure those new to political activity, who were the real targets of the rumor mill. It’s clear that fear is our biggest obstacle right now, more than actual repression, violence, or drama.
I saw an elderly friend who experienced a decade of federal harassment because she had been friends with some of the Green Scare indictees; she never really recovered and doesn’t go out to political things very often, as a result of the trauma and fear. She was overjoyed to be at this event, and participated in the illegal breakaway march with us and perhaps 400 other people. She was trying to come up with new chants and was chatting happily with me close to the front of the march.
I think it would have been better for comrades to have come not just with handbills and radical zines, but also with banners and tools to make the march more confident and capable. Given how much energy there was, even this large crowd, excited but also fearful, would have probably been excited to take more steps towards militancy, with small things like chalk and fireworks. As it happened, it was decisive that some people brought their own mobile sound system, separate from the one used by the official speakers.
Account III: A Small Town
At the first No Kings rally in our town, in June 2025, a bloc of anarchists and other anti-authoritarians started at a different location further down the famous local strip and marched past the No Kings rally in a funeral procession with a casket for Donald Trump. That intervention was a great success, drawing about a hundred people from the crowd at City Hall to the Federal Building, one of the only targets here that is actually tied to the regime in Washington, DC. The Federal Building was heavily guarded by DHS agents who had been put on high alert after an action a few weeks earlier in which someone apparently used a sharpie marked to tag “Fuck ICE” on a glass door.
Because of that intervention, the local Democrat front group that runs the liberal 50501 nonprofit protests moved from the historic strip (a two-lane one-way highway that is very easy to block traffic on) to a park on the West Side pushed up against an eight-lane highway. In 2020, liberals wanting to avert the possibility of a march after the murder of George Floyd also held a vigil at this park, though fortunately, local high-schoolers made their own intervention in response. It was clear to the anarchists and street punks that it was a counter-insurgent effort intended to limit our ability to get out onto the streets. Following up on the success of the performance art the first time around, people dreamed up another idea of how to intervene. The plan was to construct a King Donald Trump puppet that would demand protesters stay on the sidewalk and do nothing to actually threaten his regime—until a lone jester would lead a rebellion of serfs smashing and destroying the puppet.
Unfortunately, the threat of severe thunderstorms and tornado-strength winds in our region undermined this plan and at the last minute, people had to plan a more militant intervention.
About a dozen anarchists, punks, and other radicals gathered at the park on October 18 with the plan to take one or two lanes of the highway and then swing back to the park through the quiet residential streets nearby. According to subsequent reports, around 2000 people gathered at the park and lined the sidewalk down both sides of the highway. The energy and morale of the crowd was low. Despite being supposedly funded by billionaires, the liberals had brought no megaphones, were leading no chants, and had no music in their hearts. We began to march around the park, gathering a crowd of about forty people chanting and singing. People sang Bella Ciao as well as a local hymn made up for the last No King rally intervention that goes
“No Kings! No Masters! No old fascist bastards!
No Kings! No Masters! No old fascist bastards!
No Kings! No Masters! No old fascist bastards!
String’em up by their feet, let the buzzards eat
That old fascist bastard!”
After a few laps around the park, we made the decisive breakout onto the highway with a banner from the time Donald Trump came to Southern Illinois in 2018. It reads “All Ways Closed to Fascism!”—a play on the city motto.
About forty people quickly took two lanes of traffic, tightly blocking both lanes. A police car followed us and very few people joined from the crowd, but many cheered us on. We made our way up the highway before swinging back onto residential streets where most people came out of their houses and cheered us on. As we made our approach back to the park to conclude the joyous and militant march, two geezers in high-visibility vests jumped out trying to block the march, filming us and alleging that we were ICE agents because we wore masks. One of the old men even grabbed the face of one of the banner holders. People shouted anti-fascist chants over them, drowning them out. The march returned safely to the park.
Many people came and thanked us for the chants, the music, and even “the excitement.” While the liberal organizers made themselves red in the face about our intervention, we went on our merry way.
While this may not be as exciting as militant inventions or actions in the big cities, we must push the movement as far as we can anywhere and everywhere. To sit home denouncing and decrying would have been a mistake. Many good people who have no other idea how to fight went to this event. Hopefully, our act meant something to people, and the people we met there will feel more capable of rising to the occasion when things escalate.
A Few Questions with Anarchists around the Country
Why did you attend the No Kings rally?
When people gather in public to express dissent, that’s a space worth occupying and radicalizing. Showing up means making sure the message of total liberation is not erased by liberal talking points.
My comrades and I figured that there would be a lot of people using the No Kings march to confront ICE in our city. We were hoping that there would be enough chaos that cops would lose control of the situation and people would remember how we were in June and lose some of the pervasive fear that’s seems to have sunk in across the city.
Broadly speaking, I agreed with the CrimethInc. proposal. I think it’s important for us (anarchists and anti-authoritarians more broadly) to have a visible street presence again. We spent many years experimenting with various approaches to being more or less visible, and it seems clear to me now that we need to be recognizable without being targetable.
The crew I’m part of mostly didn’t go to the rally, at least not as a bloc within the march. The No Kings rally that was called in downtown here was planned from 8 to 10 am—extremely early—but let out directly into an all-day-long multicultural festival “Tucson Meet Yourself” with thousands of people, food trucks, local advocacy orgs, and families. That’s where I showed up with a backpack of zines and a couple hundred leaflets pertinent to Anti-ICE mobilizing and anti-authoritarianism. A few of us wrote and risographed them yesterday.
I attended the No Kings rally to distribute propaganda—both to challenge the more liberal narratives around how it is appropriate to respond to the current moment and to invite people with similar political goals into conversation with our movement. I also brought the goal of bringing a conflictual edge to the demo.
No Kings, 50501, and the Indivisible movement espouse liberal politics. They work with police and the Democratic Party. How did you reconcile yourself with that?
I didn’t go to endorse their politics, I went to confront the limits of their politics. Anarchists don’t need to wait for perfect conditions or perfect comrades to act. Being present in liberal spaces can open up moments in which people start to see that the state and its enforcers won’t save them. I see this as engagement, not alignment.
We went there as autonomous individuals to engage with a mass movement against fascism, not to argue with the liberal organizers who told everyone to stay on the sidewalk. Many of the people showing up to these protests are not ideologically committed to legalism or pacifism; they just see those as the only game in town. I believe it’s our job to agitate among the rank and file for real resistance. Just because twelve people with a logo and a social media account claim the authority to tell everyone else at an event what to do doesn’t mean we have to listen. I don’t think there’s any contradiction to reconcile. We show up, we stand by our values, we try to get other people to join us, and we make these orgs irrelevant.
I’m pretty comfortable using liberal events to create splinter actions. It’s a tried-and-true tactic and this felt no different. Large rallies draw out a lot of comrades who are looking for something more radical, so it’s good to be there to find them. It seems that we’re in a holding pattern in which the fascists are slowly rolling out martial law and people are too afraid to do anything because they think that could make it worse. But I think it’s important to heighten the contradictions and draw the state to overreach in order to spark the sort of widespread rage capable of genuinely confronting the state.
These boomers just want someone to talk to. We avoided the organizers and went where the most people would be.
There were lots of empty stations at the folklife festival where vendors had closed early or never arrived. We tried to set up in a booth for the “Pima County Association of Governments” to be funny, but the guy who was running it showed up, so we just moved to another empty booth and made a sign that said “Anarchist Polemical Writing for a LOW PRICE.” The stuff was all free.
Some online commenters have described it as “dangerous” to attend public rallies. What do you think the risks were?
There’s always risk when you challenge power… cops, surveillance, reactionaries, or doxxing. But hiding doesn’t make us safer. We can minimize harm through mutual support, good security culture, and situational awareness, but risk is part of the reality of resistance.
I’m not sure it felt that risky to me. Los Angeles maybe has a different landscape than red states for this, but I knew we’d be facing LAPD, not ICE and possible federal charges (which are riskier, though in Los Angeles they are generally not as risky as many think). With thousands of liberals around to provide cover, this felt like one of the safer actions going on in Los Angeles at the moment. Definitely safer than confronting ICE during a raid.
What the hell are people talking about it being “dangerous” for anarchists to be at No Kings? It’s dangerous for us NOT to be there.
Of course it’s dangerous. The regime is clearly stating its desire to crush our movement and jail, kill, or deport anyone who stands in their way. Taking action against the regime in any way, even symbolically, entails an increased risk of surveillance, police violence, and repression. However, my belief is that the risks of not participating right now are even greater. The only barrier to how far the fascists are willing to go is our resistance, and if we lose, they intend to kill us. We need to get out of the mindset of seeing danger as something that we can choose and recognize that, whether we like it or not, we are locked in a struggle for our survival.
Pshh, that’s just social anxiety. I expected that we would get kicked out for stealing a booth, but we were allowed to stay all day. In the case that we were kicked out, we planned to just move to another part of the festival, take another booth, or distribute zines on foot.
Lots of people want to talk about revolutionary anti-state politics right now. It felt good to show up as “ourselves,” explicitly putting anarchist ideas in front of people and seeing who is willing to engage.
In this case, being in a city that already has had attempted federal troop deployment and is swarming with the human garbage that work for ICE, I personally felt extremely apprehensive. Mass surveillance is real and it is bad. Given the context, however, I felt like basic security practices like masking were sufficient. Time will tell if that is true. The people I was with were mostly using this as an opportunity to be visible. No one planned on doing anything beyond being a part of the march, which informed our decisions. Some people didn’t mask, some people were in full bloc, some people somewhere in between.
I knew that attending the rally meant the unlikely risk of arrest or brutalization at the hands of the police or violence from the far right. But the biggest risk actually was not in regards to my personal safety, but that we would be unsuccessful in having an impact on the crowd or at reaching other people who are disgruntled with the Trump administration and the liberal responses to it.
What do you think you accomplished?
I had a lot of good conversations with people who were sympathetic to what we were doing, but I think the most promising thing was just how many people joined us in the streets once we demonstrated that it was possible. Even some of the peace police were cheering from the sidewalks! One older woman from the suburbs fell while marching in the street, and when we helped her up and asked if she wanted us to help her back to the sidewalk she refused. “I marched in the streets against the war in Vietnam, and I want to be in the streets now.” I also spoke with some young people after the fact who were super energized by the experience and looking for various ways to stay involved. The usual line adopted by many authoritarian protest orgs (both liberal and Leninist) is that unpermitted street protests are too dangerous for elders or children, that they inherently alienate “the masses” who aren’t ready for such big revolutionary steps as walking in the street without permission. It was good to experience a reminder of how completely false that is.
Other activists and advocacy groups were open to us being there. Surprisingly, that included “Humane Borders”—the absent humanitarian group whose booth we had taken over. At one point, one of their members stopped by our table to ask who we were. We were transparent with her that we just wanted to distribute free anarchist literature there, since this table wasn’t getting used otherwise. “Since Humane Borders didn’t show up, we’re here for No Borders!!! And we all hate ICE!” At first, she seemed confused by our antics, but she came around later to say that her group was happy we were using their table!
I found it promising that there are clearly people oriented towards militant street action that are unknown to us. I’m particularly thinking of the crews of kids bloc’ed up with Mexican flags.
What felt most promising to me was seeing fifty or so rowdy people, many of whom were total strangers, continue gathering defiantly in the street after the marshals repeatedly told them to go home. They clearly felt unsatisfied by the liberals leading the march and were visibly energized by what the anarchists had to say and the energy they were bringing to the demonstration, even when it became clear that we were attracting the ire of both the organizers and the police alike. We saw people inspired by and attracted to revolutionary messaging.
Some comrades were able to draw a large crowd of around a thousand people from the No Kings rally at City Hall to the detention center with a loud mobile speaker and some yellow protest marshal vests. The crowd at MDC was really energized by that, and there were some skirmishes with the cops, though nothing too ambitious. Everyone was very fuck the police, and people asked to hear Boosie’s “Fuck the Police” about seven times. At one point, about a hundred people were line-dancing to Payaso de Rodeo, which was really fun, and there was a whole dance-off to a Monterrey tribal set. I think the cops could tell they were losing control of the situation, because right after the line dancing, they brought out the horses and got really aggressive about clearing the intersection.
We set up a number of tables laden with hundreds of zines, posters, and stickers. One of the event volunteers approached us, a little wary, and asked what we were up to. I told her we were just a few individuals trying to share ideas and open conversation. Her energy shifted from skeptical to genuinely curious. By the end, she was smiling, asking questions, and walking away with a handful of zines.
What do you wish you had seen at No Kings that, in retrospect, you could have helped to contribute yourself?
More autonomous presence, more banners, skill shares, art, spontaneous chants not run through the “approved” mic. Spaces where people could talk freely without a stage telling them what “safe” activism looks like.
Our propaganda encourages direct action and political experimentation. The flyers all have a QR code for an “announcements” signal thread that posts upcoming antiauthoritarian events, our own marches, and the like. But we don’t have a specific upcoming event on our calendar this month which invites public participation, for example, we haven’t made a call for the formation of a citywide assembly. Those kind of things are yet to be organized.
I would have liked for us to be able to do a more coordinated distribution of propaganda so we could have had more conversations with people. There aren’t very many of us, which makes it tough to have people move together. I think that being slightly more targeted in our outreach rather than simply giving fliers and zines to whoever will take them would probably benefit us in the future.
I wish I had seen more spectacular presentations of our political messaging—whether banner drops, wheatpasting, flags or effigies on fire, or something else. In hindsight, it is clear that the march was simply a massive spectacle that was a “fun afternoon” for many liberals. Putting an anarchist twist on this to make our presence as visible as possible to others could have been somewhat promising for us and motivating for others there, if done at the right moments in the right contexts. Additionally, at many different points, anarchists could have made an effort to be at the front of the march with large, reinforced banners and a megaphone to challenge the organizers’ messaging and image, and potentially even start a breakaway march at or near the end of the route with those who did not feel finished marching or were looking for other avenues to express their political frustrations.
I wish we had prepared more ways for folks to follow up after the fact. We distributed fliers for a future Anti-ICE event widely, but a lot of folks wanted more direct ways to plug in, and we didn’t really have a way to do that beyond sharing Signal user names, which isn’t ideal. In the future, we hope to get a local Events Calendar up and running that will allow folks to plug in to less high risk events, and maybe a link to a telegram channel or admins-only Signal thread would be good as well.
Primarily, I feel that if there had been another crew of people doing splinter marches, they could have snaked through downtown or onto a freeway, and that would have split the cops’ forces and the detention center site probably would have really gone off, which would have been a huge win for the anti-ICE movement right now.
I have been thinking about what it means that we wait for these big lib orgs to organize mass actions so we can hijack them, and how much we lose by being dependent on them for that. At the same time, doing that work ourselves takes a ton of energy and coalition building that draws away from tenant union work and base-building organizing, so it never seems like the best use of time. But still, I’m wondering if there’s a way to change that dynamic.
