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So you went to a No Kings protest. Now what?
More than 8 million people showed up across 3,300 No Kings protests on Saturday, calling for an end to the war in Iran, immigration agents in their communities and what they see as Trump’s creeping authoritarianism. Organizers say it’s the greatest number of protests in a single day in US history.
But movement scholars say social change doesn’t begin and end with one protest. It takes activism at the local and national level, and in a variety of forms, to bring about change.
“No Kings was conceived to unite a cross-movement push against authoritarianism. And there is not one way to fight it,” said Leah Greenberg, a co-executive director of the Indivisible Project, which founded the No Kings movement. “We see No Kings as part of a tapestry of defiance that is going on.”
In the past year, Americans have demanded change through a variety of actions. When Donald Trump sent federal agents into Los Angeles and Chicago, people rallied in the streets and called for “ICE Out!” When consumers wanted to express disapproval of corporations’ ties to Trump, they initiated boycotts of Target, Tesla and Amazon. When students were upset at the presence of ICE agents in their schools and communities, they organized walkouts.
“Protests build power by garnering attention and pulling people off the sidelines into action,” said Hahrie Han, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in Twenty-First-Century America. “And if we look historically and across different movements, change is often a combination of people taking action through a variety of means and then leaders negotiating for power given the actions that people have taken.”
Han pointed to activists in Minnesota who were able to pass a raft of progressive and pro-labor laws in 2023 – paid family and medical leave and driver’s licenses for undocumented residents, among others – as an example of successful movement building by organizing with multiracial coalitions, strategizing with legislators and negotiating proposed legislation.
“It’s one of the most generous social safety nets in the country, and organizers were able to put grassroots energy together with institutional politics,” said Han.
No Kings’ success, organizers say, will be defined by whether attendees have signed up to organize in their communities and follow through on other actions, like know-your-rights trainings and mutual aid.
“What we think is actually important are the ways in which these large-scale gatherings fuel ongoing organizing that might look like economic non-cooperation, local mutual aid organizing or legislative advocacy at the state or local level,” said Greenberg. “It’s all connected if we do it right.”
Here’s a look at how these efforts have worked over time.
Protest
Some of the earliest protests in America include covert and overt acts that enslaved people took to object to bondage, including working slowly in the fields, breaking or misplacing tools, setting fires or running away. Enslaved people also attempted to free themselves by organizing armed rebellions and revolts.
Occupation has historically been another effective form of protest. Throughout the 1900s, Indigenous Americans protested US treaty violations by occupying Alcatraz Island, Mount Rushmore and the bureau of Indian affairs building to demand land back.
But probably the most recognizable form of protest is the one in the streets, immortalized in the marches, freedom rides and sit-ins of the civil rights movement for social justice and equal rights in the 1950s and 1960s.
Over the past 10 years, numerous mass protests have swept through the country, including March for Our Lives in 2018 to demand stricter gun control measures, the Black Lives Matter protests, triggered by the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, and the No Kings protests against the Trump administration last October. In 2025, the first year of Trump’s second term, more people protested in the streets than in 2017, the first year of his first term, according to data from the open-source project Crowd Counting Consortium
“The amount of people protesting is record-breaking,” said Hunter Dunn, an organizer with the grassroots organization 50501, which co-founded No Kings. “There’s also enthusiasm for using protests as a launchpad to get people involved in local organizing – whether it’s election defense with the midterms coming up, or immigrants’ rights organizing or organizing against AI data centers.”
Rally, march and parade
During rallies, people often gather at parks, on streets and other public locations to bring attention to a cause. A street protest or march can also culminate in a rally, where participants take turns speaking, performing music or leafleting attendees to share goals and literature about the cause.
Much like “rally”, “march” and “parade” are also terms used interchangeably with “protest”. In 1913, suffragists held the Women’s Suffrage Parade to draw attention to how women could vote in only nine states.
In 2017, activists held the first Women’s March the day after Trump’s first inauguration, protesting his rhetoric and platform as misogynistic and an overall threat to women. Activists and scholars have credited the march with driving the #MeToo movement and a record number of women to participate in the 2018 midterm elections.
“There was something special and different when people said #MeToo,” Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, told the Guardian. “We had worked on issues related to harassment and gender-based violence over many decades. But the #MeToo movement really gave people a framework to speak out and name their experiences.”
General strike
Labor unions have a rich history of protest in the US, particularly in the form of a strike or a work stoppage in which workers demand better conditions, including healthcare benefits, on-the-job safety protections and higher wages.
A general strike is much larger; it’s when a sizable portion of the workforce in a certain town or region stops working to bring about economic or social change.
The first general strike in North America was in 1835 in Philadelphia, where 20,000 workers across 40 sectors demanded a 10-hour workday and fairer wages. In the end, they won – incorporating rallies, parades and newspaper campaigns to secure 10-hour workdays for skilled and unskilled workers in the city – and became the catalyst of labor organizing in the US.
After federal immigration agents killed Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti this January, organizers called for a national general strike of “no school, no work, and no shopping” to protest the presence and brutality of federal agents in the city. Thousands in Minnesota participated in protests, hundreds of businesses closed and work stoppages occurred across a variety of sectors, backed by labor unions.
“Those of us in the trade union movement understand the leverage and power that our labor has, and we are going to try and use that, because really there’s nothing else left,” Kieran Knutson, the president of Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 7250 in Minneapolis, told the Guardian in January.
Boycott and divestment
Boycotts of corporations have historically involved a refusal to purchase their products or engage with their services, with the hope that punitive pressure can change attitudes and behaviors. Alternatively, a “procott” involves shifting resources to entities that people want to support – such as small local businesses – as they suspend support for others.
In the 1930s, Black Americans led “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns in northern cities to advocate for Black jobs at white-owned businesses in Black neighborhoods. The boycotts and picketing, in which protesters stood outside of businesses and held signs, created jobs for Black workers during the Depression.
Divestments are a related form of protest. In 1985, UC Berkeley students demanded the university divest from South Africa in protest against apartheid. Students led rallies, teach-ins and encampments to pressure the university. A year later, the University of California board of regents voted to divest $3bn from companies with ties to South Africa.
In 2025, Americans’ boycott of Target – after the company rolled back its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts – had an impact: Target acknowledged the boycott was one of the reasons sales were down last year.
“We are reclaiming our power,” LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, told the Guardian during a Black Friday boycott the group helped spearhead last year. “We are redirecting our spending. And we are resisting this rise to authoritarianism.”
Mutual aid
Under an ethos of “solidarity,” mutual aid involves a network of volunteers gathering resources – food, housing assistance and childcare – to support the needs of people in their communities.
In response to the HIV/Aids crisis of the 1980s, LGBTQ+ groups across the country developed care networks to support vulnerable community members. During the coronavirus pandemic, local organizations across the country stepped up to help low-income families, frontline workers and immunocompromised people through grocery delivery programs. One such aid program in Brooklyn, New York, supported 28,000 people with groceries between March 2020 and June 2021.
During Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis in January, in which 3,000 ICE agents killed two Minneapolis residents and arrested hundreds, mutual aid networks were vital for distributing food, money and diapers to immigrant families sheltering in place out of fear of being stopped by ICE.
Brittany Kubricky, a Minneapolis resident, told the Guardian earlier this year she was organizing donations, grocery deliveries and school pick-ups from her dining room table. “I haven’t really ever done something like this before,” she said. “This is just something I tried, and it happens to be working.”
Walkout
When students and employees walk out of schools or workplaces to express their disapproval over a certain issue, the idea is to do so in numbers – the more people who participate, the more impactful the message.
In 1968, 15,000 students walked out en masse as part of the East Los Angeles Walkouts to protest disparities in educational outcomes between white American and Mexican American students. After the walkout, students submitted demands to the Los Angeles board of education to improve the bilingual education curriculum, among other issues. Even though police arrested organizers and the board rejected their demands, the walkout was one of the largest student protests in history.
Walkouts remain a viable protest tactic for young people today, including to voice their grievances against ICE. “This was our way to make our voices heard,” Lark Jeffers told the Guardian after participating in the Free America walkout on 20 January in Silver Spring, Maryland. “Because at the end of the day, we’re 16 – what we say isn’t going to make the lawmaker listen to us.
Teach-in
This longtime form of protest is about sharing knowledge. Activists and protest leaders spend time lecturing people in the movement about their causes, often opening debate and discussion as a means of raising awareness and spurring further action.
Teach-ins were popularized during the Vietnam war when students used them to discuss the war draft and strategies to curtail the US government’s involvement abroad. The first teach-in, which included lectures, debates and films, took place at the University of Michigan in 1965 and was attended by 3,500 students and supporting faculty members. The teach-in boosted the national anti-war movement and inspired other campuses to protest and hold teach-ins of their own.
Teach-ins once again became popular on US college campuses in 2024 as Israel bombed the Gaza Strip following Hamas’ attack. The teach-ins, often in student encampments, educated participants about the long fight for Palestinian freedom and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to isolate Israel economically, politically and culturally over its oppression of Palestinians.
Composites: Rita Liu/The Guardian/Getty Images/Wikimedia Commons
new video loaded: Singer D4vd Is Charged With Murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez
transcript
transcript
Singer D4vd Is Charged With Murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez
The musician D4vd was charged with murder on Monday, seven months after the police said that the body of a teenage girl, Celeste Rivas Hernandez, had been found in the trunk of his Tesla. D4vd, whose real name is David Burke, pleaded not guilty to the charges.
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“On April 23, 2025, as has been alleged by the complaint, Celeste, a 14-year-old at that time, went to Mr. Burke’s house in the Hollywood Hills. She was never heard from again.” “These charges include the most serious charges that a D.A.‘s office can bring. That is first-degree murder with special circumstances. The special circumstances being lying in wait, committing this crime for financial gain or murdering a witness in an investigation. These special circumstances carry with it, along with the first-degree murder charge, a maximum sentence of life without the possibility of parole, or the death penalty.” “We believe the actual evidence will show David Burke did not murder Celeste Revis Hernandez nor was he the cause of her death.”
By Jackeline Luna
April 20, 2026
In this photo illustration, The Onion website is displayed on a computer screen, showing a satirical story titled Here’s Why I Decided To Buy ‘InfoWars’, on November 14, 2024 in Pasadena, California.
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The satirical website, The Onion, has a new deal to take over Infowars, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s far-right media company. If approved by a Texas judge, the deal would take away his Infowars microphone, and allow The Onion to resume its plans to turn the website into a parody of itself.
Families of those killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, who sued Jones for defamation, want the sale to happen. They’re still waiting to collect on the nearly $1.3 billion judgement they won against Jones for spreading lies that they faked the deaths of their children in order to boost support for gun control. That prompted Jones’s followers to harass and threaten the families for years.
The families are also eager to take away Jones’s platform for spewing such conspiracy theories. The deal not only would divorce Jones from his Infowars brand, but it would turn the platform against him by allowing The Onion to mock his kind of conspiracy mongering and advocate for gun control.
The families “took on Alex Jones to stop him from inflicting the same harm on others” by using “his corrupt business platform to torment and harass them for profit,” said Chris Mattei, one of the attorneys for the families. “When Infowars finally goes dark, the machinery of lies that Jones built will become a force for social good, thanks to the families’ courage and The Onion’s vision, persistence and stewardship.”
A mourner visits the Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial on the 10th anniversary of the school shooting on Dec.14, 2022 in Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty-six people were shot and killed, including 20 first graders and 6 educators, in one of the deadliest elementary school shootings in U.S. history.
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For its part The Onion called it a “significant step in an effort to transform one of the internet’s more notorious misinformation platforms into a new comedy network for satire.” The company says it could announce its new rollout of Infowars in a matter of weeks if the judge approves the deal.
“Eight years, almost to the day, after the Sandy Hook parents first filed suit against Alex Jones, they’ll finally get some justice, and even some money,” said Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion. “This is a chance to make something genuinely new out of a very broken piece of media history.”
On its website Monday, The Onion posted a satirical message from the fictional CEO of its parent company, Global Tetrahedron, “Bryce P. Tetraeder,” stating a “dream is finally coming true.”
Jones’s posted on X Monday that “The Onion Has Fraudulently Claimed AGAIN That It Owns Infowars!!!” adding that “The Democrat Party Disinformation Publication Is Publicly Bragging About Its Plan To Silence Alex Jones’ Infowars And Then Steal & Misrepresent His Identity!”
On a podcast in March, Jones alluded to the impending demise of Infowars, saying, “We’re getting shut down. We beat so many attacks. But finally, we’re shutting down like the middle of next month,” before insisting, “We’re going to be fine.”
Jones suggested Monday he would appeal any court decision to approve the leasing deal. And even if he loses control of Infowars, Jones could continue to broadcast from another studio, under another name.
Jones’s attorneys did not respond to a request for comment.
More than a year ago, a federal bankruptcy judge rejected The Onion’s first attempt to buy Infowars through a bankruptcy auction, saying the process was flawed. Since then, the bankruptcy court clarified that because Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, is not itself in bankruptcy, its property should be handled instead by a Texas state receiver. That cleared the way for the new pending deal to lease Infowars to The Onion, with the hope that a future sale could be approved.
In papers filed in state court, the Texas receiver said he “determined that licensing the Intellectual Property is in the best interest of the receivership estate.”
The deal calls for The Onion to pay $81,000 a month to license the Infowars.com domain and brand name, which the receiver says will “cover carrying costs to preserve and protect the assets of the receivership estate” until an appeal filed by Jones is decided and the path is cleared for a sale.
Jones’s personal bankruptcy case is proceeding in federal bankruptcy court, where a trustee continues to sell off Jones’s personal property, including cars, homes, watches and guns, with proceeds intended for the families.
A memorial to massacre victims stands near the former site of Sandy Hook Elementary on Dec. 14, 2013 in Newtown, Connecticut, one year after Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 first graders and six adults at the school.
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US negotiators to head to Pakistan and Iranian cargo ship seized – a recappublished at 00:37 BST 20 April
Tankers in the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday
Here’s a recap of the latest developments.
US negotiators will head to Pakistan on Monday with the intention of holding further talks on ending the war, Trump says – but Iranian state media cites unnamed officials as saying Tehran has “no plans for now to participate”.
The prospect of further high-level negotiations – a White House official says Vice-President JD Vance will attend – comes amid reports of fresh attacks on commercial vessels.
Trump says the navy intercepted and took “custody” of an Iranian tanker attempting to pass through the US blockade, “blowing a hole” in the ship’s engine room in the process.
Earlier, in the same post announcing his representatives would travel for more talks, Trump renewed his threat to destroy Iranian energy sites and bridges if no deal is reached.
Reports in Iranian media over the weekend suggest Iran is continuing to work on plans to potentially apply a toll to ships passing through the strait – although it’s unclear if such a move will be implemented.
Iranian state TV cites unnamed officials as saying that “continuation of the so-called naval blockade, violation of the ceasefire and threatening US rhetoric” are slowing progress in reaching an agreement.
Trump also accused Iran of violating the ceasefire, saying more commercial ships have been attacked by Iran in the Strait of Hormuz.
A UK maritime agency reported two commercial ships came under fire in the strait on Saturday.
Iran’s foreign minister had said on Friday that the strait would be opened – which was shortly followed by Trump saying the US naval blockade of Iranian ports would remain in place until a deal is reached. Iran has since said the strait is closed again.
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