# There's no King in No Kings 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, 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 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. Marin Luther King Jr.  Contemporary political movements like _No Kings_(no relation) are, I fear, intentionally divorced from Civil Rights tenets. With its gorgeous brand assets, and pithy single-sentence messaging, the No Kings movement can go toe-to-toe with any Texas megachurch marketing. National protests have scaled well, too, and they aren't shy about comparing their crowd sizes to 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 not _did we win?_ it's _“were we polite?”_ It's the antithesis of what I remember the discourse to be around the 2010s when the resist movement was set to make history.  > 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” as a zero-tolerance 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, not a school-yard code of conduct. 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. Instead, the footer manifesto dictates we stand outside the diner with a sign, shouting through the glass all the demands we aren't willing to 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. ## Who will take the reins? 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 promised 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.  We demand the resignation of our late-stage neoliberal king, but have yet to consider the power vacuum that precedes it. So, as it stands, when neoliberalism dies, it's _fascism_ or _technocracy_ that will take over.  My bet is on technocracy.  ## Technocracy in the wings I often get "okay if this doesn't work what does?" and the first thing 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. 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.