# There's no King in No Kings When did we get so fucking polite? Today, I find myself reading *Letter From a Birmingham Jail* in the hope of finding some familiarity. The essay by Dr. Martin Luther King doesn't deal much in metaphor, unlike his speeches. Instead, I get a grounded look into the practice and purpose of protest. > Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. — *[Letter From a Birmingham Jail](https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html)* by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Contemporary political movements like *No Kings* (no relation) are, I fear, intentionally divorced from Civil Rights tenets. Though, its sharp brand assets and pithy single-sentence messaging does allow the Indivisible-funded org to go toe-to-toe with any Texas megachurch. National protests have scaled well, too, dedicating most of the No King's homepage comparing crowd sizes with Trump's inauguration. But, at its core, No Kings is a Potemkin Village that doesn't belong to any grander mission. It lacks crisis, it avoids disruption of the status quo, and discourages direct action. No Kings operates exclusively within the grooves of political decorum, careful never to spill over onto the laps of those we are protesting. It's this proper behavior that a *No Kings* march strives to achieve. It's less *did we eat?* and more *“did we keep our elbows off the table?”* It's the complete opposite of what I remember the discourse being in the 2010s, when the resist movement was set to make history. Maybe we got old. > A core principle behind all No Kings events is a commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values and to act lawfully at these events. — [No Kings website](https://nokings.org) // No Kings invokes “non-violence” as an HR policy against civil disobedience and direct action. But, that’s not how Dr. King defined the term, and it's important we regain that knowledge. During Jim Crow, the unlawful act of sitting in a “whites only” diner meant patrons, store owners, and police officers would, almost certainly, retaliate against you, often violently. Non-violence in the Civil Rights era was a discipline. It showed us how to respond after scalding hot coffee was thrown in our faces. It taught us how to react *after* we had disrupted the status quo using direct action. The No Kings' declaration of “non-violence,” therefore, is a perversion of the original term, because the movement discourages the inciting incident. Its footer manifesto dictates we stand outside the diner with a sign, staring through the glass with all the demands we aren't willing to go inside and take for ourselves. If an organization lacks a call-to-action, or it foregoes any opportunity to compel decision-makers to come to the table, then what we see on our Instagram feeds the next day isn't protest. Its content. I remember when the resist movement, young and bold, was about more than one King. It was about healthcare and education. We fought for living wages and equal pay for equal work. We marched for Black lives. We were going to defund the police state and fund our communities. Sure, it was a liberal movement, so direct action wasn't always our strong suit. But it was colorful. It was ours. The resist movement today feels so millennial gray. No Kings, MeidasTouch, The Lincoln Project—these are corporate-approved think tanks just trying to keep neoliberalism alive. They've distilled all our problems down to a Trumpian sludge to better grease the wheels of reactionary politics. So what we get is a movement content with the cogs of fascism so long as they get to pull the levers. They're the antithesis of activism. They're *deactivism*, because they deactivate the masses away from real systemic change, and towards RSVPs and IG photo shoots.