FEATURING BRANDON WOLF - Over the past year, two major national mobilizations under the banner of “No Kings” have brought hundreds of thousands of Americans to city streets to protest the dictatorial administration of Donald Trump. Now, the third such mobilization takes place March 28.
Brandon Wolf is an LGBTQ+ civil rights and gun safety advocate, bestselling author, and survivor of the 2016 mass shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. He currently serves as National Press Secretary for the Human Rights Campaign. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about what people can expect at the marches.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: How do you assess the success of the first two No Kings mobilization? It's always tough to sort of measure the impact of a gathering because you can't necessarily tell that this or that policy changed because of it, but do you have any measurements to suggest that those two mobilizations that came before were indeed successful?
Brandon Wolf: Yeah, I think I'm most excited by the growth of the No Kings Coalition. Both, the organizations that have been helping to plan events across the country, and also the number of people that have shown up. If you think about it, back in October, there were 7 million people that took to the streets in this country.
And then you saw that energy only continue to grow as people fought back in places like Portland and Minneapolis. You had millions of people turning out to the streets of Minneapolis to push back against ICE occupation of their communities. And that was in the freezing, bitter, maybe even historic cold, for some communities.
When we hosted our Eyes on ICE training, which is teaching people how to spot ICE in their communities and warn others, inform others of what rights they have , 200,000 people showed up for that training on a weeknight, which just tells you how powerful the movement is when it can not just show up in the streets one day, but can sustain that kind of energy over time.
So, if you can imagine 7 million people in the streets in October, you had millions of people on the streets in Minneapolis pushing back against ICE in the bitter cold. You can imagine how large that will be on March 28.
