SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
michael moore
Pro-Democracy Americans Gear Up for 'No Kings' Day Nationwide
"Don’t miss this chance to be part of the largest expression of free speech we’ve ever had," said progressive filmmaker Michael Moore.
Oct 17, 2025
Organizers are expecting Saturday's nationwide "No Kings" rallies to be among the largest single-day demonstrations in US history, and many activists and politicians on Friday sent messages of encouragement to demonstrators.
Leah Greenberg, the co-founder and co-president of Indivisible, which is one of the main organizers of the demonstrations, told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! on Friday that she and her group are "engaging in the most American activity in the world, which is coming together in peaceful protest of our government."
Greenberg then addressed attacks from President Donald Trump and other Republican lawmakers over the last week that the "No Kings" events were a "hate America" rally.
"This is a classic exercise of the authoritarian playbook, to try to create fear, to try to threaten, to try to make people back off preemptively," she said. "We're not going to do that... we won't be cowed."
Former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich also hit back at GOP claims that the "No Kings" rallies were anti-American, and he argued that the people attending them will be doing so out of a deep sense of patriotism.
"We’re rallying tomorrow because we LOVE America," he wrote in a post on X. "It's an opportunity for all of us who love this country to express our determination that our nation’s ideals not be crushed by the Trump regime."
Progressive filmmaker Michael Moore encouraged his supporters to take part in Saturday's demonstrations, and he wrote on his personal Substack it was of the utmost importance for Americans to make their voices heard in the face of authoritarian threats from the Trump administration.
"Don’t miss this chance to be part of the largest expression of free speech we’ve ever had," he said. "Time has run out. One year from now, don’t find yourself wishing you had done something. Said something. This is our last chance, the final moment to stop the madness. I implore you to join us."
Several Democratic politicians also expressed support for the demonstrations.
Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY) blasted Trump and the GOP for attacking the patriotism of the "No Kings" protesters.
"I'll be damned if I'm gonna let the Draftdodger-in-Chief tell me what a patriot is," he wrote in a social media post. "We're STANDING UP, SPEAKING OUT, and FIGHTING BACK. No Kings in America. See you Saturday."
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) sent out a video message expressing solidarity with Chicago and Portland, Oregon, two cities in which Trump has tried to deploy National Guard soldiers, and let them know that they fighting against authoritarianism by themselves.
"The people everywhere are standing up, in all 50 states and thousands of towns and cities across America," he said. "We have no kings here, no crowns, no thrones."
A Message for No Kings Weekend: The millions rallying across the country love America and are defending it with joy, wit, defiance and courage. Everyone who stands with us now will win the affection and gratitude of people for all time. pic.twitter.com/xmHD5MjTpm
— Jamie Raskin (@jamie_raskin) October 17, 2025
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) accused Trump and Republicans of waging a campaign of intimidation aimed at frightening Americans out of exercising their rights to peacefully demonstrate.
"The Republicans' attacks on the No Kings protests are sickening," he wrote in a post on Bluesky. "To them, only pro-Trump speech is protected. If you oppose Trump, you 'hate America' or you're a 'terrorist.' What they're trying to do is simple: suppress turnout this weekend. Don't let them win."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Desperation, Pain Drives Debate Over Making Photos of Mass Shooting Carnage Public
While some say showing what high-caliber bullets do to children's bodies could spur change, others warn that it risks traumatizing viewers—and re-traumatizing victims and their loved ones.
Jun 03, 2022
Amid the desperation, pain, and frustration in the wake of last month's massacre of 19 children and two teachers at a Texas elementary school, there is renewed debate about whether making public post-mortem images of those killed by AR-15s and other assault weapons would help move the public or lawmakers in the U.S. towards taking real action on gun violence and mass shootings.
"I just cannot believe that Americans in this country would see what these weapons do to our children, our teachers, our community, and that they would stand by and do nothing."
In a society that often averts confronting the bloody and graphic consequences of its domestic and foreign policy choices, many people argue the images of children and others who suffer unimaginbale violence--like Emmett Till's pulverized body, Phan Thi Kim Phuc running naked and napalm-scorched down a South Vietnamese road, or Derek Chauvin's knee slowly choking the life out of George Floyd--have the power to change minds and potentially upend horrific norms.
Trauma surgeon Amy Goldberg believes Americans wouldn't be so numb to gun violence--which claims tens of thousands of U.S. lives each year and is so frequent that only the most horrific mass shootings make national headlines--if they saw what she has seen so many times.
"I think the citizens need to see the destruction of what these military-style weapons do, and that would be pictures," Goldberg told NPR earlier this week. "And I don't say that lightly. I don't say that with any disrespect, but I'm desperate. All the trauma surgeons need this to stop."
"I just cannot believe that Americans in this country would see what these weapons do to our children, our teachers, our community, and that they would stand by and do nothing," she continued.
"Emmett Till's mom had an open casket, and I'm sure that had some impact on the civil rights movement," Goldberg added. "The napalm girl--you know, those images, brought into our homes during the Vietnam War, I think significantly made change."
In an op-ed published by Common Dreams on Wednesday, attorney and social justice activist Mitchell Zimmerman contended that "there is no Second Amendment right to protection from reality."
Noting that "a number of states force women exercising their constitutional right to abortion to look at fetal sonograms before ending their pregnancy," Zimmerman asks, "What if states required anyone who wants to buy an assault rifle, or other semi-automatic weapons, to first see photos or films that show what such weapons do to human bodies?"
"Perhaps some would reconsider whether they really need this kind of weapon to hunt or engage in target shooting," he said.
The debate is not a new one. After 26 students and staff were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012, Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Michael Moore asserted that the entire country was complicit in the slaughter due to gun control inaction.
"That is why we must look at the pictures of the 20 dead children laying with what's left of their bodies on the classroom floor," the Bowling for Columbine director said. "Then nothing about guns in this country will ever be the same again."
Moore's remarks sparked widespread outrage.
"There is no Second Amendment right to protection from reality."
"We want to remember the little angels as they were, with their happy expressions and faces and you want to think of the teachers trying to hold them safe and not to see the pictures of their bodies," said the leader of a Newtown parents group who called Moore's idea "a horrendous offense to the families."
Lenny Pozner told The New York Times that after his six-year-old son Noah died at Sandy Hook, he considered showing the world photos of what a 5.56mm x 45mm NATO-spec bullet--the type fired by an AR-15--does to a child's body. Made for use in war, such bullets can decapitate a person or leave a body looking "like a grenade went off" inside it, according to trauma surgeon Peter Rhee.
Pozner's first thought was, "It would move some people, change some minds." His next thought, however, was, "Not my kid."
Others believe that those puhsing for making such images public are mistaken and that many people--especially those so steeped in their sacrosanct right to bear arms that no number of dead children would move them--would "stand by and do nothing," as MSNBC opinion columnist Michael A. Cohen wrote on Thursday.
"To be an advocate of near-unfettered access to firearms means shutting out all the evidence that one's selfish demand for practically limitless gun rights is responsible for so much needless suffering," he continued. "It means looking at Robb Elementary, Sandy Hook, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the 2017 mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas, or countless other tragedies and deciding that the fetishization of steel and bullets plays no role whatsoever."
"Making public the pictures of the children slaughtered at Uvalde's Robb Elementary School would likely do little to change minds or seriously reshape the debate about guns in America," Cohen conluded. "But allowing people to see such pictures would increase the national trauma around gun violence."
"It's something you never want to see and it's something you don't, you cannot, prepare for. It's a picture that's going to stay in my head forever, and that's where I'd like for it to stay."
Some proponents of showing photos argue that it could come down to the way in which the images are displayed.
"I can imagine some pictures that could be made without dehumanizing the victims that speak to the story of the AR-15, which is a story that has not been seen or fully told," Nina Berman, a documentary photographer, filmmaker, and Columbia journalism professor, told the Times.
"For a culture so steeped in violence, we spend a lot of time preventing anyone from actually seeing that violence," she said. "Something else is going on here, and I'm not sure it's just that we're trying to be sensitive."
There is also the very real possibility that ordinary people viewing images of extraordinary carnage could be traumatized, perhaps even forever. Uvalde coroner Eulalio "Lalo" Diaz, Jr. had the grisly task of idenfitying victims of the Robb Elementary School massacre.
"It's something you never want to see and it's something you don't, you cannot, prepare for," he said of the crime scene. "It's a picture that's going to stay in my head forever, and that's where I'd like for it to stay."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Diplomacy, Not Bombs: Anti-War Voices Say Afghanistan Shows Need to Stop Any Further March to War
"The only thing that we 'accomplished' by going into... Afghanistan was to put trillions of taxpayer dollars into the military-industrial complex and destroy millions of lives."
Aug 16, 2021
Amid the lightning collapse of Afghanistan's U.S.-backed government and the all-but-certain return of Taliban rule, anti-war activists on Monday stressed that diplomacy, not bombs or the military-industrial complex, is the only path to lasting peace.
"Nearly two decades of military intervention and occupation did not build lasting peace. No number of bombs dropped, no length of time occupied, would have."
--Stephen Miles, Win Without War
The stunning but predictable Taliban reconquest of Afghanistan marks the end of the nearly 20-year U.S.-led war that cost the lives of more than 200,000 Afghans, displaced over five million more, and diverted at least $2 trillion in American taxpayer funds that progressive critics said could have been better spent on programs of domestic and international social uplift and well-being.
As the war ends where it began--with the Taliban in control of most of Afghanistan--the prospect of the country becoming a so-called "failed state" and haven for militant groups like al-Qaeda has prompted numerous observers to speculate that U.S. troops will return, and not just in the "over-the-horizon" operational capacity touted by President Joe Biden and Pentagon brass.
Peace advocates, however, emphasized the imperative to pursue diplomatic over military solutions to regional problems, with Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.)--the only member of Congress to vote against the 2001 authorization for the invasion of Afghanistan and so-called War on Terror--asserting that "there has never been, and will never be, a U.S. military solution in Afghanistan."
\u201cThis image should be seared into our minds as a message to stop going into other countries.\u201d— Ariel Gold \u05d0\u05e8\u05d9\u05d0\u05dc \u2721\ufe0f\u262e\ufe0f\ud83d\udd4a (@Ariel Gold \u05d0\u05e8\u05d9\u05d0\u05dc \u2721\ufe0f\u262e\ufe0f\ud83d\udd4a) 1629110233
Stephen Miles, executive director of Win Without War, said in a weekend statement that "the United States can best help mitigate violence today not with bombs, but with diplomacy, and by supporting efforts to build peace."
"Nearly two decades of military intervention and occupation did not build lasting peace," said Miles. "No number of bombs dropped, no length of time occupied, would have."
"Our responsibility toward Afghanistan does not end with the end of our military occupation," Miles added. "Just the opposite: Only now that we may finally recognize the failure of the war-first approach can we fully start down the long, difficult path of peace."
Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the women-led peace group CodePink, demanded accountability for "those responsible for 20 years of epic failure," while warning that "now we have to stop the military-industrial complex from dragging us into new wars."
\u201cA shout out to all who joined CODEPINK and other peace groups to oppose the invasion of Afghanistan. From Bush to Obama, we called for our troops to come home. Now we have to stop the military-industrial complex from dragging us into new wars. #DefundThePentagon\u201d— Medea Benjamin (@Medea Benjamin) 1629064083
Filmmaker and activist Michael Moore echoed Benjamin's call to slash U.S. military spending, tweeting: "Defund the military-industrial complex (increase funding for veterans!), defund the NSA, defund Homeland Security."
Warren Gunnels, staff director for the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, which is chaired by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), argued that "the only thing that we 'accomplished' by going into Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan was to put trillions of taxpayer dollars into the military-industrial complex and destroy millions of lives--period, full stop."
"It's time to stop repeating the same mistakes over and over again," Gunnels asserted.
\u201cThe U.S. war on Afghanistan wasn't "pointless", it enriched precisely who it was meant to. \n\nCompanies that profit from war get richer as the world burns. Don't forget this as politicians & weapons lobbyists try to justify the next war for "humanitarian" concerns! #DivestFromWar\u201d— CODEPINK (@CODEPINK) 1629132414
\u201cNow would be a good time to cut America's $740,000,000,000 defense budget and reinvest funding in human needs.\u201d— Public Citizen (@Public Citizen) 1629134631
Azadeh Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director of the racial and economic justice group Project South, tweeted that it "should be clear by this point that the only ones who benefited from the U.S. war on Afghanistan were war-profiteering politicians and corporations while countless lives were destroyed."
"Remember this," added Shahshahani, "the next time the U.S. war machine is pushing for yet another invasion."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular