No Kings Day: A Democratic Party Attempt to Misdirect and Fracture a United Working-Class Movement Against the Predator Class

No Kings Day protest in Tulsa, Oklahoma, October 18, 2025. [Source: Photo Courtesy of Jeremy Kuzmarov]

The nationwide mobilization was framed as resistance to authoritarianism but operated as a prime example of controlled opposition orchestrated through Democratic Party infrastructure.

Events spanning more than 2,600 locations included major demonstrations in Washington, D.C., New York City and San Francisco along with many other cities and towns.

Organizers promoted the message that “America has no kings.” People who attended the rallies largely condemned Donald Trump and policies he has adopted they abhor—though some used the opportunity to vent larger grievances with the federal government and its corruption.

Behind the public-facing movement, funding, logistics and strategic messaging of the “No Kings” event were largely controlled by Democratic Party-aligned unions, donor networks, and non-profit organizations.

While presented as grassroots opposition to executive overreach, the movement illustrates how controlled opposition can redirect genuine public anger toward partisan objectives, shaping narratives, defining targets, and selectively framing abuses to fracture potential working-class unity.

No Kings Day protest in Tulsa, Oklahoma, October 18, 2025. [Source: Photo Courtesy of Jeremy Kuzmarov]

Blogger Caitlin Johnstone wrote: “the whole thing was just one big pep rally for the Democratic Party, designed to accomplish nothing beyond getting American liberals excited about the prospect of someday voting for Gavin Newsom. A bunch of boomers showed up to dance around and hold signs and feel as though they are fighting the power in their feely bits, while drumming up support for the same status quo which gave rise to Trump in the first place.”

Origins and Structure of Controlled Opposition

The No Kings movement was publicly launched as a reaction to perceived authoritarian behavior by the Trump administration.

Organizers highlighted actions such as the deployment of federal forces in Democratic-led cities, expanded federal authority, draconian anti-immigrant measures and media manipulation as evidence of “king-like” behavior.

These accusations against the Trump administration are accurate and deserving of protest. What is concerning is that the operational architecture behind these protests reveals systematic Democratic Party involvement.

Endorsing organizations included the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), national and local Indivisible chapters, and labor unions such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

Local Democratic Party offices coordinated logistics, volunteer deployment and messaging.

This structure allowed a partisan-aligned network to present opposition as grassroots while controlling the scope, targets and framing of dissent, a classic hallmark of controlled opposition.

No Kings Day protest in Tulsa, Oklahoma, October 18, 2025. [Source: Photo Courtesy of Jeremy Kuzmarov]

Funding Mechanisms and Strategic Narrative Control

Financial contributions played a decisive role in scaling and directing movement activity. Public filings show that the Indivisible PAC received substantial donations from institutional and individual donors, while philanthropic entities such as the Open Society Foundations provided multi-million-dollar grants to overlapping networks of political advocacy.

Funds covered advertising, staffing, legal support, travel and digital outreach, enabling nationwide coordination. Importantly, donor priorities influence message selection, determining which critiques of executive power are amplified and which historical precedents are ignored. In this way, financial control reinforces strategic narrative framing, ensuring the movement serves party objectives rather than independent civic critique.

No Kings Day protest in Tulsa, Oklahoma, October 18, 2025. [Source: Photo Courtesy of Jeremy Kuzmarov]

Selective Targeting and Historical Omissions

While No Kings Day emphasized executive overreach under Trump, it deliberately omitted comparable behaviors by previous Democratic administrations, demonstrating controlled opposition.

Intelligence Agency Weaponization

During the Obama administration, the FBI and CIA conducted dubious covert operations including FISA surveillance, the use of the Steele dossier, and politically motivated investigations that culminated in Russiagate.

These operations showed how intelligence agencies can be weaponized for political ends, yet No Kings Day messaging framed authoritarianism as a Republican-only problem. Under Biden, intelligence operations continued with surveillance programs, censorship and selective prosecutions that mirrored past abuses, yet these were excluded from the public narrative.

COVID-19 Mandates

The Biden administration’s COVID-19 policies included vaccine mandates for federal employees, contractors and private-sector workplaces, alongside state and local public health enforcement.

While expanding executive authority and clearly violating individual civil liberties, these measures were absent from No Kings Day critiques, which framed authoritarianism solely as a Trump-era phenomenon, reinforcing partisan misdirection.

Protests against vaccine mandates. [Source: cnn.com]

Foreign Policy

Both Obama and Biden centralized decision-making in foreign policy, initiating or escalating covert and/or proxy wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Libya, Somalia and Syria among other countries and sanctions programs under executive discretion that bore devastating social effects.

The Obama and Biden administrations also ramped up the U.S. drone war that normalized extrajudicial assassination, with most of the victims being civilians.

No Kings Day protests ignored executive overreach under these Democratic Party administrations, making it seem like only Trump is behaving like a king.

They in turn made it seem that the solution to America’s problems is simply removing Trump, when Trump is merely a manifestation of systemic problems and consolidation of power of an oligarchic elite that is intent on preserving its class rule at whatever the cost.

No Kings Day protest in Tulsa, Oklahoma, October 18, 2025. [Source: Photo Courtesy of Jeremy Kuzmarov]

Working-Class Implications

By presenting a narrow, partisan critique, No Kings Day fractured potential cross-partisan working-class alliances.

Issues like health care, education, housing, labor rights, and economic security, which affect millions of Americans across party lines, were subordinated to a narrative targeting one party. This strategy ensures that structural power remains unchallenged, redirecting energy toward partisan outcomes rather than systemic reform.

Keynote Speakers Are New Cold War Hawks—and Refuse to Condemn Capitalism

In the Washington, D.C., No Kings Day rally, the two keynote speakers—Senators Bernie Sanders (D-VT) and Chris Murphy (D-CT)—have both supported the Ukraine War and NATO and U.S. regime- change operation in Syria (the largest CIA operation since the 1980s that helped empower Al-Qaeda) and have adopted Russophobic rhetoric underlying the new Cold War.

Like the original Cold War—which warped the U.S. political economy and fueled endless regime change operations and war—the new Cold War is diverting needed government resources to the warfare state and organs of state repression instead of social needs—something that Murphy and Sanders were, of course, silent about in their speeches.^[1]

Bernie Sanders and Chris Murphy [Source: freebeacon.com]

Other speakers served in the Biden administration foreign policy apparatus and military where they were involved in morally bankrupt operations that wasted taxpayer funds and destroyed countless human lives.

Sanders and Murphy in their speeches, characteristically, failed to condemn capitalism as a system and how the fascistic-oriented nature of the Trump administration represents the natural evolution of that system.

As CovertAction Magazine’s copy editor who attended the rally said, “they railed against the millionaires and billionaires, the unfairness of health care coverage, etc., but never could bring themselves to name the real problem.”

Union and Grassroots Mobilization

Unions, including the SEIU and AFT, provided logistical capacity, organizational discipline and strategic coordination, ensuring that events run smoothly and messaging remained consistent. Grassroots organizations coordinated via social media, mapping tools, and apps to reach communities nationally.

These mechanisms amplified scale while maintaining control over the narrative, exemplifying how controlled opposition leverages grassroots energy to serve partisan objectives.

Legal and Political Dimensions

States have responded with preemptive measures, deploying National Guard troops to maintain public safety.

Republican lawmakers have proposed legislation targeting the funding and organization of protests, including proposals from Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) empowering the Department of Justice to prosecute movement organizers.

From a controlled opposition perspective, such legal threats are instrumentalized in messaging, portraying the opposition as under attack while obscuring the party-aligned orchestration behind the scenes.

No Kings Day protest in Tulsa, Oklahoma, October 18, 2025. [Source: Photo Courtesy of Jeremy Kuzmarov]

Characteristics of Controlled Opposition

No Kings Day illustrated several hallmarks of controlled opposition:

1. Selective Critique: A focus on one administration while omitting comparable historical examples.

2. Narrative Framing: A messaging highlighting only selective abuses and suppresses systemic patterns.

3. Resource Control: Funding, staffing and infrastructure that is concentrated in aligned networks.

4. Strategic Redirection: Public anger that is channeled into symbolic protests that maintain elite power structures.

5. Fracturing Potential Coalitions: Cross-partisan working-class unity that is undermined by partisan-aligned narratives.

Conclusion

No Kings Day was not simply a grassroots protest; it was a demonstration of controlled opposition, designed to appear independent while guiding public dissent in Democratic Party-aligned directions. By framing authoritarianism as a partisan issue, leveraging donor networks, unions, and non-profit infrastructure, the events diverted energy from structural challenges to elite power concentration.

Effective resistance to concentrated power would require:

· Consistent scrutiny of all administrations, not selective targeting.

· Coalition-building across working-class sectors, beyond party lines.

· Structural reforms limiting emergency authority and reinforcing legislative oversight.

· Formation of new political parties like the Populist and Socialist parties of the early 20^th century that present a genuinely progressive platform and can mobilize millions of Americans

Until these conditions are met, events like No Kings Day will function as managed dissent, channeling opposition in ways that fracture potential unity and preserve predator-class dominance.

Notes

[1] See Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano, The Russians are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018). On the CIA’s bankrupt Syria operation and Sanders’s support for the rhetoric underlying it, see Jeremy Kuzmarov and Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change, with foreword by Oliver Stone (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2025).