The Democrats’ much-ballyhooed “No Kings” protests on Saturday turned out to be more fizzle than fireworks. As details of the day roll in, they paint an unflattering portrait of a political party in disarray, struggling to force a phony message upon an electorate that’s grown increasingly skeptical of them.
Perhaps the most incisive take came from Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. Replying to a post that called the Manhattan rally “more of a scheduled appearance than a real grassroots movement” — one that went “from packed to sparse in record time” — Benz said Washington, D.C., had fared no better, dubbing the event a “coup d’flat.”
Benz was spot on.
Attendees did not appear to know why, precisely, they were there
The real story came through in the words of the attendees. In the clip below, a young participant tells a reporter that “Trump’s a b*tch.” Asked to elaborate, he said, “I don’t know. We don’t like him. That’s the word around here.”
Asked if there were any particular reason why he doesn’t like Trump, the protester replied, “No clue at all. I’m just going with [what] everybody else is saying.”
He was hardly the only attendee who had no clue what he was protesting. Christian Conservative influencer Caroline Joyous interviewed several participants at a rally in Alabama. None of them provided her with a serious response when she asked “What are some ways that President Trump has put your freedom in danger?”
One man, dressed as Jesus, complete with a crown of thorns, said, “I wouldn’t say my freedom’s in jeopardy.”
When Caroline asked, “So why are you here at the No Kings protest?” he had nothing to say.
A second protester, dressed in a shark costume, had no response.
A third participant merely said, “Um.”
A fourth began, “I think, um, that he has done so by … ” [End of response.]
Clearly annoyed by the question, another replied, “Like, you’re not cute, this isn’t funny.”
@carolinejoyous Crashing a “No Kings” protest as a Christian…😅 #christian #conservative #republican #liberal #nokings
The majority of protesters appeared to be senior citizens
Aside from a small contingent of very young participants — as is often the case at left-wing protests, the crowds appeared to consist largely of baby boomers.
ZeroHedge’s Tyler Durden emphasized this point:
Any momentum gained by No Kings, Indivisible, and their activist networks, along with billionaire sponsors, could quickly evaporate in the colder months when boomers generally stay indoors or head south. We have a strategy idea for Indivisible kids running the show: try riling up the boomers in The Villages, Florida.
Protester reveals to Newsmax reporter that they’d been trained
Questioned by Newsmax correspondent Alana Austin at the Washington, D.C., rally, a pink-haired protestor, a self-described “anti-fascist,” admitted they’d received instructions from event organizers on how to behave. This is a tell-tale sign these protests were not a grass-roots effort.
With her back to the camera, she told Austin:
We’ve all been told to be peaceful. We’ve had training on how to be peaceful and to deescalate.None of us want anything that’s not peaceful.
As PJ Media’s Matt Margolis put it:
I’ve been to real protests—small groups holding signs, big crowds that showed up because they cared, with no one handing out instruction manuals or cutting checks. That was activism. What we’re seeing now from the radical left is something else entirely: astroturfing on an industrial scale.
In 2009, I participated in the Taxpayer March on Washington, a large Tea Party protest against President Barack Obama’s policies. We had no training. We weren’t equipped with mass-produced signs. We made our own and we each knew precisely why we’d come. My sign read, “One Big A** Mistake America.”
The ‘No Kings’ events were backed by the Communist Party and the Marxist Movement
The list of sponsors for the “No Kings” protests includes the Communist Party USA, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the Freedom Socialist Party. As Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) points out in the post below, they don’t even try to hide it.
The protests were funded by all the usual suspects
Days before the protests, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) told Fox News’ Sean Hannity, “There’s considerable evidence that George Soros and his network are behind funding these rallies, which may well be riots all across the country.”
Working alongside Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, investigative reporter Seamus Bruner has helped expose the money trails behind such controversial entities as the Biden family’s influence peddling business and the Clinton Foundation.
Last week, Bruner reported that the No Kings initiative received major funding from powerful left-wing dark money groups including: Arabella Advisors, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, as well as the Ford, Tides, Buffett, and Rockefeller Foundations.
Moreover, the leadership of these groups all seem to be connected. Fox News reports, for example, that Leah Greenberg, who serves as the executive co-director of Indivisible, the group that “managed data and communications” for the No Kings protests, formerly “served as the policy director for the Tom Perriello for Governor of Virginia campaign. Perriello was the executive director for the Open Society Foundations from October 2018 to July 2023, furthering the ties between Soros and the Indivisible organization.
Indivisible has been “awarded grants every year since the organization’s conception in 2017” from Soros’s foundations, as per Fox.
If the name Indivisible sounds familiar, it is because the group has organized many protests over the past few years, including the national Tesla protests, according to Fox News’ Laura Ingraham.
The dark money flowing out of these groups is eating away at America’s institutions. The Department of Justice has begun tracing the web of donors, shell organizations, and offshore accounts behind it.
For all of the tens of millions of dollars spent on the No Kings protests, there’s little evidence that they moved the political needle. As we saw, not even attendees are buying the spin that Trump is the second coming of Hitler.
That might be because Democrats more closely resemble Nazi Party propaganda master Joseph Goebbels than Trump does “der Führer,” and that voters are finally catching on.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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