{"id":14575,"date":"2025-10-18T11:17:06","date_gmt":"2025-10-18T11:17:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/no-kings-comes-to-washington-amid-shutdown-stalemate\/"},"modified":"2025-10-18T11:17:06","modified_gmt":"2025-10-18T11:17:06","slug":"no-kings-comes-to-washington-amid-shutdown-stalemate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/no-kings-comes-to-washington-amid-shutdown-stalemate\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018No Kings\u2019 comes to Washington amid shutdown stalemate"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The nationwide \u201cNo Kings\u201d protest movement is back for round two \u2014 and after avoiding Washington during the summer, protesters are expected to descend on the nation\u2019s capital Saturday amid an 18-day government shutdown that has no end in sight.<\/p>\n

The demonstrations are part of the second national day of action, organized by dozens of liberal advocacy groups to protest what they call \u201cauthoritarian power grabs\u201d on the part of President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

Organizers said they expect the more than 2,600 events across all 50 states to surpass the more than 5 million people who attended the first wave of \u201cNo Kings\u201d rallies in June. The marches come amid heightened criticism from Republicans about this weekend\u2019s rallies.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey might try to paint this weekend’s events as something dangerous to our society, but the reality is there is nothing unlawful or unsafe about organizing and attending peaceful protests,\u201d said Deirdre Schifeling of the American Civil Liberties Union. \u201cIt’s the most patriotic and American thing you can do, and we have a 250-year-old history of disagreeing in public.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amid the heightened tensions of the shutdown, Republicans have repeatedly sought to vilify the planned protests. House Speaker Mike Johnson and other leading Republicans have referred to the protests<\/a> as a \u201chate America rally\u201d and sought to tie it to Hamas and antifa. And Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also announced Thursday<\/a> that he would be sending members of the state\u2019s National Guard \u2014 as well as state troopers, Texas Rangers and Department of Public Safety personnel \u2014 to Austin on Saturday in response to the planned demonstrations.<\/p>\n

In an interview with Fox News earlier this week, Trump said \u201csome people say [Democrats] want to delay\u201d ending the government shutdown because of the rallies.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey’re referring to me as a king. I’m not a king,\u201d Trump said in the interview<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Organizers remain undeterred by the response, though. Leah Greenberg, progressive advocacy organization Indivisible co-executive director, called it \u201cpart of a broader effort to create a permission structure to crack down” on peaceful protests.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are panicking and they are flailing and they are searching for anything \u2014 literally anything \u2014 to distract from their own governing failures,\u201d Greenberg said of Republicans at a press conference. \u201cAnd in their desperation, they have decided to go with smearing millions of Americans who are coming out to peacefully, joyfully assert our rights.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first wave of rallies that took place on June 14 \u2014 the same day as Trump\u2019s military parade in Washington, which coincided with the army\u2019s 250th anniversary and Trump\u2019s 79th birthday \u2014 were overwhelmingly peaceful, and organizers said then that they intentionally avoided a counterprotest in Washington to avoid the military parade.<\/p>\n

The events went off almost entirely without incident, save for one notable exception of volunteer rally \u201cpeacekeepers\u201d shooting and killing a bystander at a Utah march because they believed another man with a gun was about to fire on the crowd.<\/p>\n

Republicans\u2019 efforts to demonize the rally comes amid a White House push<\/a> to target left-leaning nonprofits perceived as hostile to the administration\u2019s agenda.<\/p>\n

Unlike the June protests, the Saturday slate of events also includes a rally in front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington. When asked for comment on Saturday\u2019s rallies, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson responded: \u201cWho cares?\u201d<\/p>\n

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who is set to address the crowd in Washington, earlier this week criticized the push as an effort to \u201csuppress turnout.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re showing us how much they hate free speech,\u201d he said in a Wednesday social media video<\/a>. \u201cThe rhetoric has ramped up from Republican leaders in the last few days.\u201d<\/p>\n

The speaker list in D.C. also includes Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Karen Attiah, a former Washington Post columnist who was fired last month after attracting criticism<\/a> for several social media posts in the wake of conservative activist Charlie Kirk\u2019s murder.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The nationwide \u201cNo Kings\u201d protest movement is back for round two \u2014 and after avoiding Washington during the summer, protesters are expected to descend on the nation\u2019s capital Saturday amid an 18-day government shutdown that has no end in sight. The demonstrations are part of the second national day of action, organized by dozens of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14575\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}