Making Democracy Work No Kings Rally

Democracy is NOT a destination.

It takes the demos (Greek for “the common people”) actively engaging to advance and protect democracy (“rule by the people”).

Join us in a peaceful, non-partisan, non-violent, and uniting gathering at NOON on October 18.
Blumenfeld Park is across from the library, next to the Landmark.

The national League of Women Voters declared our country in a Constitutional Crisis on April 17, 2025, citing flagrant disregard for congressional authority and governmental checks and balances, defiance of Supreme Court and Federal Court orders,

Watch the Video

Since April, lawlessness has become a constant drum beat:

Masked men, often wearing street clothes or all black with no insignia; drive unmarked cars and vans; tackle, handcuff, and abduct people off the streets — targeting skin color and speech, rather than seeking specific individuals for cause. Further, they flagrantly violate Fifth Amendment protections owed everyone within US jurisdiction.

Americans have a right to live under “constitutional law,” but civilian areas have been put under “martial law,” military control; there are specific laws against sending thousands of US military personnel into American cities. Worse, our military does not have the training in law enforcement or public safety that our police have.  We have now been told that (blue) American cities will be used as military “training grounds,” that is, to train troops in subduing enemy territories controlled by enemy combatants.

The Constitution gives Congress the “power of the purse,”  but the Executive has slashed funding allocated by Congress for scientific research, public health, economic data collection. statistical analysis, and more. We have been told that acknowledging “diversity” and investigating disparate outcomes is now against the law; we are told by cabinet secretaries that “diversity is not our strength,” in fact it “makes us weak” despite  E Pluribus Unum being chosen for our Great Seal in 1782 and included on all current coins since 1795 and on the one dollar bill since 1935.

Despite the Constitution giving the “power of the purse” to Congress, appropriated funds are being withheld or clawed back, or transferred to non-budgeted uses, for explicitly partisan reasons (e.g., withdrawing previously allocated billions of dollars for “blue states” but not for “red states”).

What can we do?  We can and must resist. 
In as many ways as the diverse American public can pursue — and is pursuing.

We must make our myriads of ways of resisting visible — one such way is by regularly gathering in mass mobilization so that individual resistance is amplified by millions of others.

Erica Chenoweth’s research has been much discussed:
peaceful, focused, non-violent resistance has been astonishingly successful over the past century.

In fact, non-violent resistance has rarely failed when 3.5% of the population joins.

That is about 8.5 million Americans.  “Hands Off” in April may have had 3 to 5 million participants, and “No Kings” in June had 4 to 6 million, one of the largest single-day protests in American history.

The Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights wrote, based on their findings:

“Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts…and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.”

To learn more, listen to a podcast interview with Chenoweth: