On Saturday, October 18, 2025, an anticipated 2,500 protests will be held across United States for a day of street demonstrations organized under the “No Kings” moniker. This is the second call to action by the No Kings coalition, the first held in June as a response to the military parade that just happened to roll tanks down the streets of Washington, D.C. on President Donald Trump’s birthday. That event saw a turnout of between 2 million and 4.8 million people (and possibly more) in and cities towns across the United States, according to the Crowd Counting Consortium, making it one of the largest single-day protests in the country’s history.
For everyone who values First Amendment guarantees found in the U.S. Constitution, the time has come to “use it or lose it.”
For the October 18 No Kings event comes amid Trump administration pledges to expand the surveillance and targeting of protest and speech under ill-defined and infinitely elastic categories. Following the assassination of far-right activist Charlie Kirk, an executive order issued by Trump on September 22 defines the non-organization “antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization,” while the National Security Presidential Memo 7 (NSPM-7) of September 25 expands the post-9/11 apparatus of federal policing—but also, crucially, local policing—to “leftwing terrorism” (as hallucinated by a salivating Stephen Miller).
Together, both the “antifa” EO and NSPM-7 seek to “investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”
In reviving notions of “pre-crime,” as independent journalist Ken Klipperstein observes, the Trump administration has found a convenient way to treat all protest as “terrorism.”
This past week, Reuters reported that the primary targets of this expanded federal targeting are not necessarily leftwing or radical organizations but rather center-left nonprofits and the institutions of liberal democracy broadly (freedom of the press, elections, the constitution, the courts)—a point trenchantly made by Timothy Snyder, a historian of authoritarianism, and the hosts of the deeply researched, actually anarchist podcast It Could Happen Here.
The list of targets made publicly available thus far seem to confirm this. These include the very mainstream ActBlue, Arabella Advisors, Bonterra, and the Open Society Foundation, along with George Soros and Reid Hoffman as large donors to the Democratic Party. Indivisible, Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights are also listed.
To ridicule this deployment of “antifa” is not to minimize the thrust of its commitments—not only to dismantle U.S. progressive movements, but more broadly to chill our very first constitutionally-given rights: to criticize our government publicly and to peacefully assemble.
As Snyder says:
“So the Trump people talk about antifa. Talk about it, talk about it, talk about it. But what are they actually aiming at? The real target are people who are basically today’s Social Democrats [the center-left party in 1930s Germany that opposed Hitler’s rise to power]. The people who are in favor of voting, the constitution, the rule of law, liberty…that sort of thing.
“That’s the real target: the very broad center of American politics. The things we’d like to think of as ‘normal,’ the things we’d like to think of as ‘American.’ The things we’d like to think of as being ‘tradition.’ … When they say they’re going after ‘antifa’ they mean they’re going after civil society. They’re going after the structures and the freedoms that allow the United States to be the thing that it is—flawed, like Weimar Germany, but with the democratic possibility of becoming better.
No Kings, Texas
Abilene3pm-5pm / 555 Walnut St / Abilene, TX 79601 Alpine 2pm-6pm / Alpine Civics Center / 801 W Holland Ave / Alpine, TX 79830 Arlington10am-12pm / Arlington Sub Courthouse / 700 E Abram St / Arlington, TX 76010 Austin2-5:30pm / Texas Capitol / 1100 Congress Ave. / Austin, TX 78701 Brownsville5pm-7pm / Morrison Plaza / 3450 Pablo Kisel Blvd / Brownsville, TX 78526 Corpus Christi4pm-6pm / Water's Edge Park / 602 S Shoreline Blvd / Corpus Christi, TX 78401 Dallas12pm-3pm / Pacific Plaza / 401 N Harwood St / Dallas, TX 75215 Del Rio10:30am-2:30pm / Del Rio Civic Center / 1915 Veterans Blvd / Del Rio, TX 78840 El Paso11am-2pm / Edgemere Boulevard & Airway Boulevard / El Paso, TX 79925 Fort Worth11am-3pm / 501 W 7th St / Fort Worth, TX 76102 Houston12pm-2pm / Discovery Green / 1500 McKinney St / Houston, TX 77010 Laredo10am-12pm / Jett Bowl North / 5823 McPherson Rd / Laredo, TX 78041 McAllen10am-12pm / Federal Courthouse / Bicentennial Boulevard & Highway 83 / McAllen, TX 78501 Midland10am-11:30am / 300 W Wall St / Midland, TX 79701 New Braunfels10am-12pm / Intersection of S. Walnut Ave and W San Antonio St. / 1035 W San Antonio St / New Braunfels, TX 78130 Odessa10am-1pm / 4960 E 42nd St / Odessa, TX 79762 San Antonio4pm-6pm / Travis Park / 301 E Travis St. / San Antonio, TX 78205 San Marcos1pm-3pm / The Square / E Hopkins St and N LBJ Dr / San Marcos, TX 78666 And dozens of events in smaller towns like Cibolo, Kyle, and Pflugerville. Check the full map at No Kings and check in with your local groups for any last minute changes to times or locations.
Predictably, the administration’s logical next step has been to position No Kings as “part of antifa,” in the words of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, as reported in The Hill. And as such, the administration plans to take the “same approach” it has with “cartels,” as Attorney General Pam Bondi put it at the “White House Roundtable on Antifa” held October 8—an approach that has included lethal strikes on boats off the coast of Venezuela that have killed 27 people on the pretext of targeting “narcoterrorists” without any apparent legal justification, actions Amnesty International has called “murder, plain and simple.”
MAGA officials in Texas didn’t miss a beat in the authoritarian zeitgeist. Governor Abbott has sent Texas National Guard troops to Illinois and Oregon to support deportation operations there (despite the killing of a father who had just dropped his child off at school and operations that increasingly sweep up U.S. citizens) and plans to use them to police No Kings marches in Austin. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton also announced that he had launched “undercover operations” in Texas against “various groups affiliated with left-wing political violence.”
Still, it is critical to keep clear on the difference, as Snyder emphasizes in a separate communique, between reporting what someone says versus reporting on “the organizing of a panic,” such as the panic over “antifa”:
“While there are a lot of people who are against fascism—and they’re right to be so—there is no large-scale, massive, underground thing called ‘antifa.’ There’s no underground organized connection between these liberal non-governmental organizations and recent shootings. That is all made up. That is a panic. That is a fact. And the politics of panic are a thing. They’re a fact. The things that authoritarians say to organize panics are not facts.”
So while it’s true that surveillance of protest is on the rise, it is critical to remember that we still have a right to assemble, to speak, and to protest. As aptly stated in a No Kings safety and security training, “the best way for us to protect our First Amendment rights is to keep using them. If we stop exercising these rights out of fear, we forfeit our power in advance.”
To crib from Snyder once more, we must continue to “live as if we were free.”
For that reason, the folks organizing the San Antonio’s No Kings rally and march encourage everyone to bring water and wear comfortable shoes. But they do not play into the panic, offering only that participants who are “worried about being tracked” should also turn off location services on their phone before leaving home for the protest. Similarly, masks are encouraged, but only for those who are “worried about being targeted.”
Alex Svehla, head of the San Antonio 50501 chapter co-organizing No Kings, said the administration’s allegations about those protesting Trump’s abuses have been bizarre to watch.
“It’s definitely surreal because it’s so anti-American. To be attacking people just based off of their political beliefs or their free speech. But, you know, when [U.S. House Speaker] Mike Johnson said that [No Kings] is a ‘hate America’ rally, that just makes me laugh. … Because this is not, like, how America’s supposed to work. This isn’t how our government’s supposed to work.
“We just hope, through the rallies and protests, we can bring about change. Of course, things aren’t gonna happen overnight. It’s a long process, but this is just one of those parts of the processes we have to get through.”
Find the No Kings rally closest to you via the NO KINGS website, which includes trainings on protest safety and security as well as Know Your Rights info.
