No Kings Rally in Kingston Reflects Growing National Movement

“Not to speak is to speak,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German anti-Nazi dissident wrote, and on Saturday in Kingston, a few thousand people decided they had said enough by saying nothing.

They showed up at Academy Green with signs—so many signs—each one a small act of refusal, a cardboard brief against the present tense of American politics. If you wanted to take the temperature of the moment, you didn’t need a poll. You just had to read.

“Dear Congress, F**king do something.”
“Trumpty Dumpty.”
“Dirty Don the chaos king divides the people to reign supreme.”
“I’m proud and thankful for my immigrant grandparents. ICE out.”
“The ruling class is why we can’t have nice things. No billionaires. No oligarchs. And definitely no kings.”

Some were angry, some funny, some handmade with the careful block lettering of someone who had spent a long time getting it just right. One featured a pink toad in a crown—grotesque, surreal, unmistakable. Another diagrammed parasites—ticks, worms—before landing on a familiar quartet of billionaires. A teenager held a sign that read, “Teens shouldn’t have to protest the actions of adults. Even I know right from wrong.” Nearby, someone else had opted for brevity: “Unpaid and agitated.”

The march moved out from the Green and into the streets, a long, steady river of people. An accordion player kept time. Someone banged a drum. A man in a black cap that read “Vote bitches” stood wrapped in an American flag like a counter-argument. Another marcher carried a sign that read, simply, “Gimme an F!”—the rest left to the crowd to supply.

It was local, unmistakably so—Kingston being Kingston—but it was also part of something much larger. Across the country, millions turned out in more than 3,000 No Kings rallies, the latest in a series of mobilizations that have grown in size and intensity since last summer. The issues animating them have only multiplied: the war with Iran, aggressive ICE operations—including incidents that have left U.S. citizens dead—the continued erosion of asylum protections, and a foreign policy that has veered from saber-rattling to outright adventurism.

What’s notable is not just the scale, but the spread. These aren’t just big-city protests. They’re happening in places like Kingston, Delhi, Monticello, and Warwick—towns that don’t usually see themselves as epicenters of national politics but are increasingly behaving like they are.

And the mood has shifted. There’s still humor—there always is—but less whimsy than before, more clarity. The signs feel less like satire and more like statements. Less clever, more direct. The crowd, too, feels different: not just activists, but people who look like they have crossed some internal threshold, from watching to participating.

That shift matters, especially with a midterm election on the horizon. Protests don’t vote, but they do indicate where energy is building—and energy, if it sustains, tends to find its way into turnout.

It’s too early to say whether No Kings will translate into electoral change. American politics has a way of metabolizing dissent without altering course. But standing on the sidewalk as the march passed—hundreds upon hundreds of people, signs bobbing, voices carrying—you could feel something coalescing. Not just opposition, but cohesion.

A movement that knows what it’s against, and is starting to understand what it might be for. The signs said it plainly enough. No kings. No oligarchs. No patience left for either. And in Kingston, at least for an afternoon, that wasn’t just a slogan. It was a crowd.

No Kings Rallies Sweep Hudson Valley Amid Rising Tensions

by Brian K. Mahoney March 24, 2026March 24, 2026