Only Democratic Kingmakers

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — March 23, 2026

There’s a national protest day coming up. March 28. Big energy, big turnout, big messaging. “No Kings.” Anti-authoritarian. Anti-Trump. All the right words in all the right order.

Good.

Now let me ask the question nobody wants to answer.

Where the hell were you in 2011?

Because some of us were already there. Not tweeting. Not marching for a few hours. Not showing up with a sign, grabbing a selfie, and heading home before dinner.

We stayed.

We slept on concrete. We ate whatever showed up. We got rained on, cold, sick, exhausted. We built kitchens, libraries, medical tents out of nothing. We dealt with police every damn day. Not once. Not twice. Every day.

That wasn’t a protest. That was pressure.

And the system didn’t “engage” with us. It didn’t “hear our concerns.” It didn’t “invite dialogue.”

It cleared us.

Coordinated. City to city. Chicago, New York, Oakland, Denver, LA. Same playbook, different zip codes. Suddenly it was about “sanitation.” Porta-potties. Health concerns. Public safety. That was the story they sold.

And leading that charge in Chicago? Rahm Emanuel. Democrat. Insider. Power player.

Let’s not rewrite history here.

The same political ecosystem now happy to amplify “No Kings” messaging is the one that crushed Occupy when it got too real. When it stopped being symbolic and started being disruptive. When it stopped asking politely and started existing in a way that couldn’t be ignored.

That’s the line.

Occupy asked whether the system itself was broken.

Today’s protests mostly ask whether the system can be fixed by swapping out the people in charge.

Those are not the same fight, and the response from power reflects that.

So yeah—go protest on March 28. Seriously. Go. Make noise. Be seen. It matters more than doing nothing.

But don’t kid yourself.

A one-day protest is expression. It’s a signal. It’s a headline. It’s a blip in the media cycle.

An encampment is pressure. It disrupts. It forces decisions. It makes people in power uncomfortable in a way they can’t just wait out.

That’s why one gets coverage and the other gets cleared.

And here’s the part that’s going to piss people off.

If you really believe the stakes are as high as you say—authoritarianism, democracy on the line, all of it—then act like it.

Get a tent.

Hit the ground.

Figure out the porta-potties.

Be there tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that.

Because if you’re not willing to stay, then what you’ve got isn’t a movement.

It’s an event.

And events don’t scare power. They don’t even inconvenience it.

They just fill up a Saturday.

WPS News exists because memory matters. Because someone has to say, clearly and on the record, that we’ve been here before—and we know the difference between a moment and a movement.