Eight million people showed up, and many on the internet called it pointless. We don't buy the nihilism; but we also don't pretend a permitted Saturday rally is the same thing as disrupting power. This episode, we dig into what No Kings actually does well (making dissent visible, connecting you to neighbors and organizations, being the tip of a much larger iceberg), and what it doesn't do on its own. We talk Montgomery bus boycott logic, general strike groundwork, mutual aid, and how movements win by targeting pocketbooks and prestige. Paperwork is the unsexy engine of real organizing.
Then Dan takes us to Granby, Colorado, and the story of Marvin Heemeyer; a welder who spent 18 months secretly armoring a bulldozer in a shed, then spent two hours demolishing 13 buildings before dying alone in a basement. It's a story about how local capital weaponizes the law, what happens when every legal avenue closes, and why the internet's folk hero version of KillDozer conveniently strips out the part where the people who cheered for it would have sided with the Docheffs in todays political landscape.
Links Info
No Kings / Protest Organizing
- NoKings.org — find or host events, training resources: https://www.nokings.org
- Mobilize with No Kings — volunteer and event finder: https://www.mobilize.us/nokings/
- Indivisible (lead No Kings organizer): https://indivisible.org
- 50501 Movement (coined “No Kings”): https://www.fiftyfifty.one/
- MoveOn: https://front.moveon.org
- ACLU: https://www.aclu.org
Nonviolent Resistance Research
- Erica Chenoweth's 3.5% Rule explainer — Harvard Kennedy School: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/advocacy-social-movements/35-rule-understanding-what-makes-protest
- Why Civil Resistance Works (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011) — Columbia University Press
- Crowd Counting Consortium: https://ash.harvard.edu/programs/crowd-counting-consortium/
KillDozer / Marvin Heemeyer
- Wikipedia — Marvin Heemeyer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Heemeyer
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