Today, I find myself reading *Letter From a Birmingham Jail,* hoping to feel some familiarity. The essay by Dr. Martin Luther King doesn't deal much in metaphor as his speeches had. Instead, we get a sobering 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 so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. Contemporary political movements like *No Kings* (no relation) are, I fear, intentionally divorced from these Civil Rights tenets. Not so much by the people who make up these protests—I support anyone who marches against fascism in any capacity and context—but by the organization itself. Recent protests are grand in scale, and are well-branded, but it lacks crisis. It lacks disruption of the status quo. It lacks direct action. And, to squash any misguided grace for the *No Kings* org, these specific marches are not simply one layer of a multitude of diverse tactics. No, *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. > 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 uses “non-violence” to mean “non-disruptive.” We are to arrive orderly, shout into the void orderly, and leave orderly. “Non-violence” means zero-tolerance for civil disobedience or direct action. But, that’s not how Dr. King defined the term. “Non-violence” in the Civil Rights era was a discipline. It taught us how to react *after* we had disrupted the status quo using direct action. Dr. King anticipated violent retaliation from the state and citizens. His non-violent tactic showed us how to respond. The unlawful act of sitting in a “whites only” diner meant you'd be retaliated against. The “non-violent” discipline showed us how to respond when white patrons threw scolding hot coffee in our faces. Based on the No Kings' core principle, would a Black person sitting in a “whites only” diner be an act of violence since it fails to de-escalate the situation? The No Kings' declaration of “non-violence” is a perversion of the term, because No Kings lacks an equivalent to a diner sit-in. Instead, its footer manifesto dictates that we stand outside the diner with a sign, shouting through the glass the demands we aren't willing to take. If an organization lacks a call-to-action, or a means to compel decision-makers to come to the table, then what we see on our Instagram feeds the next day isn't protest. It's content. It's a gathering—a rally with signs, color, and spirit. It has a beginning, middle, and end no matter the outcome. You can RSVP and subscribe on the very platforms owned by the people we're protesting *(and, I don't just mean X. I mean Instagram, Facebook, Substack, YouTube, and TikTok)*. If you, personally, find value in these gatherings, that's great. I don't want to take that away from you because, again, we are on the same side. But *No Kings* is not moving the needle. I fear the liberal resist movement has become a way to keep the masses busy and feeling accomplished. At best, it's a sign of solidarity. At worst, history will scratch its head, wondering why the resist movement never considered what happens the day after Trump. We don't know any better because we lack true revolutionary leaders guiding us towards successful outcomes. We have influencers whose call-to-actions aren't civil disobedience, but rather like, comment, and subscribe *(don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe, btw).* So I ask you this, dear reader: Is it Brooklyn Dad who will redistribute the baguettes when the king's metaphorical head is on a hypothetical platter? Is it Nancy Pelosi, decked-out in full Kente cloth, who will lead us to the promise land? No. Of course not. So, effectively, we don't actually have a viable opposition ready to take the reins of power when neoliberalism dies. And it *will* die, or, transform. One, Ten, fifty, or a hundred years from now, we will experience a power vacuum. We're experiencing it right now, as a matter of fact. *“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born,”* and all that. No Kings, MeidasTouch, The Lincoln Project—these are corporate-approved think tanks trying to keep neoliberalism alive. They create outrage farms on corporate social media to keep us too angry to organize our thoughts. They're the antithesis of activism. They're *deactivism*, because they deactivate the masses away from real change, and towards branded content and IG photo shoots. And listen. I want to say this a thousand times. I'm not speaking from above you. I'm speaking as someone who experienced the neoliberal resist machine first hand. We are on the same side. I'm merely pointing out the flaw in our activism. This isn't personal, friend. We demand the resignation of our late stage neoliberal king, but have yet to consider the power vacuum that proceeds it. So, as it stands, when neoliberalism dies, it's *fascism* or *technocracy* that will take over. My bet is on technocracy. But, honestly, who's to say. This is how I see it: To solidify its power, fascism must transform existing neoliberal systems, because both are the same bug, after all—ICE, the police state, mechanisms for bribery and corruption—the butterfly borrows from the caterpillar. So, for fascism to truly take over, it must undergo metamorphosis. It must retrofit, to use a different analogy. Tricky stuff, I suppose. Technocracy, conversely, owns its levers of power outright, and they've been building for decades. Technocracy owns the means of communication, and the steel and glass required to operate the Internet. They don't have bullets, but they control the computational power that guides the barrel of the gun. Technocrats have an unholy amount of wealth and power and it wields well. Technocracy has an answer to the looming employment crisis. It is, unfortunately, an answer that liberals seem to love. Universal Basic Income will sound like our savior when everyone is unemployed and robots are deep frying our chicken wings and writing the code that allows us to order dinner. ## So, what do we do? I often get "okay if this doesn't work what does?" and the first step is just to unlearn and relearn. But from a tactical perspective, where the solution becomes more subjective, in my opinion, the answer is to slowly move away from the platforms own by the technocracy waiting in the wings. The challenge is, no voices on these big platforms will ever recommend we leave because they've made advocacy a full-time job, and leaving means they can no long support themselves, because they've not worked to move off these platforms. Every last advocacy group, political influencer, independent journalist, are financially dependent on the very systems causing the most harm. Can you picture a world where Meta was bankrupt, Substack went under, and Google was too busy fixing search for its lost users to advance its war mongering efforts? We'd all still have the open web to organize on. Maybe we have less professional political pundits, but that doesn't seem like something we'd miss. --- 3.5% rule No empire has been so flimsy.