🌎 TOMORROW: NO KINGS Day!

Trump himself has not weighed in on the October 18 protests. After the June protests, though, he said, “I don’t feel like a king, I have to go through hell to get stuff approved.”

“‘No Kings’ means no paychecks, no paychecks and no government,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said. Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, said Democratic leaders weren’t running the show in the Senate, but protesters were. He also repeated a common false refrain that protesters were being paid.

Meanwhile, the child in the White House is spending his time making commercials for watches, trading cards, Trump Tokens and more...

What is the 3.5% rule in protest?

Organizers and protesters this year have repeatedly drawn on research that showed if 3.5% of a population protests nonviolently against a regime, the regime will fail. This theory has been dubbed the “3.5% rule”.

Political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan created a database of civil resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006, analyzing whether non-violent or violent movements were more likely to succeed and whether there was a tipping point in terms of size for protests to actually expel the party or person in power. The results showed non-violent campaigns were often much larger and were twice as likely to succeed than violent movements. They were more representative of the population, and, they found, active and sustained participation by 3.5% of a population meant a movement would succeed, with very few, specific exceptions.

In the US, 3.5% of the population would be more than 11m people. So far, these mass days of action have not hit this threshold, though the threshold is not a magic number. Chenoweth noted in 2020 that the figure is a “descriptive statistic” derived from historical movements, “not necessarily a prescriptive one”, meaning it is not necessarily a guarantee to organize around, as some are explicitly doing now.

While the exact number isn’t magic, the basics behind the statistic hold true: sustained, mass, nonviolent resistance can topple governments.
- The Guardian