No Kings, No Masters: Why Protests Alone Won’t Save Us

Guest blogger Chris Sutton returns with a timely reflection on the 50501 protests scheduled for October 18, 2025. In this essay, Sutton explores the role demonstrations play in shaping political discourse and offers practical next steps for those looking to channel protest energy into lasting action.

On May 13, 1985, Americans woke up to the news of an armed standoff happening in West Philadelphia. Police were attempting to arrest members of the Black revolutionary group MOVE, including their founder John Africa, on cooked up, spurious charges of everything from noise violations to criminal conspiracy. After several failed efforts to get the group to vacate their communal home voluntarily, Philadelphia police laid siege to the commune, firing several thousand rounds wantonly at doors, windows, and anything that appeared to be a person. By evening, police had grown tired of the group's refusal to leave, and with the approval of city leaders, police chief Gregore J Sambor made the decision to drop an improvised explosive from a helicopter onto the house. The explosion and resulting fire ended up killing Africa, as well as 10 others including women and children who were holed up inside trying to avoid the barrage of gunfire. Sambor subsequently directed the fire department to “stand down and let them burn” instead of intervening to suppress the fire. The MOVE commune was completely incinerated. 61 houses in the area also burned down, and by the next morning, roughly 250 residents were homeless. Only two members of the MOVE commune survived, Ramona Africa and Birdie Africa. Ramona was charged with criminal conspiracy and spent 7 years in prison, while Birdie, who was 13, was placed into foster care. No members of the police of city officials were ever held criminally responsible, despite knowingly dropping a bomb on a house that contained children, and allowing the fire to burn, causing damage outside of the compound, which damaged the entire neighborhood.

John Africa, founder of MOVE

John Africa, formerly known as Vincent Leaphart, the founder MOVE, was a Black social revolutionary and Korean War veteran who saw the horrors of US imperialism during his service and came to the conclusion that America as a project, needed to be rejected. Africa, like many revolutionaries, is a complicated figure and it’s impossible to sum up his ideology in a short essay like this one. One can certainly ascertain that you’re not going to win the battle of hearts and minds by being the neighborhood carnival barker, going to street corners and yelling through a megaphone about the evils of capitalism, imperialism, and materialism to random passerby’s. Perhaps our modern view of these types of actions have been tainted by the freakazoids like Westboro Baptist, but I think in general, most people just don’t like getting yelled at. However, Africa’s MOVE was much more nuanced than that. Despite his brash theatrics, Africa did strongly embrace a view of a shared humanity guided by a “back-to-nature” approach - emphasizing life for all living beings (all MOVE members adhered to a strict vegetarian diet and abhorred cruelty to animals and humans alike). Africa proselytized the importance of communal living, making sure everyone had everything they needed to service despite their ability to produce. To a hyper atomized, consumer-driven society, this kind of “woo woo hippie-dippy” worldview would usually only gain purchase in a smoke tent after a day long drug binge at something like Burning Man. Eventually, once the high of envisioning a “new type of society” wears off, reality hits you like a freight train, and your utopian dream is scuttled by the announcement of a new Sweet Green being built a block away that will surely cause your landlord to jack up your rent. But for Africa and MOVE, this utopia was something they believed in and put into practice. And for a decade, an alternative society in this little corner of Philadelphia, posed enough of a threat to American capital interests, it had to literally be blown up. But MOVE’s threat to the state wasn’t just the practice of an alternative to American Capitalism.

There’s a long history of policing in America that has unfairly targeted Black people, with tragic consequences that go far beyond individual incidents. However, the police’s particular consternation surrounding MOVE in Philadelphia was Africa’s emphasis on militant self-defense. MOVE preached vociferously about the importance of standing up, with arms if necessary, to defend against oppression. Unlike their white, suburbanite, counterparts - you know, the guys who don’t see the irony in having the Gadsden flag stickers next to Punisher Skull Blue Lives Matter flags on their trucks kind of guys - MOVE truly believed in armed resistance should the government tread on their lives. And that’s the rub. The United States and its ruling class will (to an extent) let you have your ideas, let you have your fun, and even allow you to express some of that fun so long as it’s within bounds deemed acceptable by the state. It’s when those expressions turn into organized action that the state gives itself permission with its monopoly on violence, to repress those expressions - whether it be by criminalization or outright bullets and bombs. I’m not the first to point out that the state relies on having a monopoly on violence, because a government owned and operated by the interests of the few, are usually going to make unpopular decisions that make a majority of people upset.

Credit to Photographer Chris Henry, on Unsplash

The Black Lives Matter protests began with the message that Black people’s lives have equal value to white folks, and that the state/police are incarcerating and killing too many people, mainly those of color. The demands were that police departments need to be defunded, and we need to have a full reconstruction of the quote unquote “justice system" that treats people of a certain color and class one way, and others a different way. What we got, instead, was a Democratic Party hellbent on defanging a grassroots movement, perverting those demands. The result was BLM leaders being absorbed into the Democratic Party establishment, and instead of reconstructing our police departments, we just somehow decided that giving them more money would fix the problem. Sidewalks and streets that were paved to say BLACK LIVES MATTER were eventually neglected, if not outright removed, corporations decided DEI was no longer profitable and abandoned the policies at the first sign of pushback from a hostile administration. Nothing structurally was changed, and even the meager window dressing wins that were extracted from city officials and corporations eventually withered away from waning public pressure. Ultimately, police killings of minorities have remained essentially the same, while we continue to defund schools, health clinics, community centers and so forth, while police budgets continue to skyrocket.

In my adoptive home of Cincinnati, the current battle cry of the jughooters in the Hamilton County Republican Party is that crime is going up (it isn’t) and the only solution is to complain. (then again, when isn’t that the republican strategy?) Meanwhile, there are those within the local Democratic Party who claim that being nicer to cops, and giving cops wheelbarrows full of money, and more tools like Shotspotter and plate readers (both things that data overwhelmingly prove is useless) will stop crime. My point is, neither party, local, state, or Federal is ready to, as they say “meet the moment” over the final stage of America's own Third Reich moment, because frankly, neither party cares. I wrote a long essay about how both parties have had no issue laying the groundwork for our current iteration of fascism. Now, as we’re seeing ICE run rogue (if they were ever even contained), snatching people off the streets, arresting journalists for the crime of doing their job, and just generally acting like Gestapo, everyone is wondering what to do.

The logo for the 50501 Movement

A nationwide group called 50501 are, to their credit, trying to organize massive protests against Trump and his administration. The actions are called the “No Kings” protest, and impressively, they have garnered millions of people to get off twitter and spend a few hours of their day in solidarity to protest what they see as American Fascism evolving from a specter on the horizon to an ugly reality. The problem is, we’ve seen this playbook before. The narrative that Trump and his administration are an aberration instead of a natural conclusion is an idea that should have done the way of the penny farthing. We’ve also seen true grassroots energy be subsumed into a political superstructure like the Democratic Party, that has no interest in changing the foundation of a framework that benefits those within it. The folks at 50501 are trying to capture this moment and do the same thing. We know this because their protests are marketed as in accordance with “non-violence” where outside agitation will not be tolerated. To the untrained eye this sounds completely reasonable. 

Looking deeper, it often becomes clear that some of these protests function more as symbolic gestures than vehicles for real change—designed to express frustration with the current administration while ultimately channeling public anger back into traditional party politics. In some cases, organizations like 50501 have even coordinated with local law enforcement, handing over individuals they label as 'agitators.' This raises a difficult contradiction: how can a movement claim to challenge power while simultaneously relying on and reinforcing the very structures it seeks to oppose? That tension speaks volumes about the complexity of America’s political landscape. Once again, many liberals appear to place their faith in the idea that playing by established rules and expressing outrage in carefully measured ways will eventually lead to progress. But groups like 50501 and their organizers may overlook a hard reality: they are attempting to fight fair in a political environment where the rules are already stacked against them. The Trump administration, if anything, has demonstrated that the notion of ‘law and order’ often functions less as a standard of justice and more as a flexible set of guidelines applied selectively.

In America, freedom often extends only as far as the boundaries set by the state. That freedom can quickly narrow when people try to organize outside of those limits. The 50501 protests, while justified in their anger at the Trump administration, raise important questions: what demands are being made that truly challenge those in power? Why align so closely with local law enforcement, when those same agencies often cooperate with ICE in deeply harmful ways? And why place so much faith in the Democratic establishment, which has too often chosen compromise with authoritarian policies over genuine resistance in the name of bipartisanship? None of this is to say that people shouldn’t attend protests, let alone the 50501 sponsored ones. What I am trying to say, is that going in, it’s important to recognize the limits of protests and vocal dissent. Channeling anger into mobilization is crucial. But even more importantly, is the next step of organizing mobilizations to begin to create concrete demands. If you’re apart of a group working to seriously challenge power, I believe these types of protests are the best type of networking you can do to bring in to bring in disaffected liberals and steer them towards more productive action. If you’re someone finally getting off of the sidelines to participate, then that should be celebrated. But it can’t stop with attending a few hour protest, a post on social media, and moving on. Seek out groups doing the organizing work that isn’t glamorous, but necessary. Join local ICE watches, sign-up for Know Your Rights canvassing and flyering. There are endless examples I could provide, but the key is, use this as a starting point. Because ultimately, even if a protest were to somehow remove Trump, these problems will still continue to exist and intensify if the underlying structures are not changed.

We’re well past the conversation of “changing the system from within” or technocratic cutting around the edges to trickle in some form of equality and justice for folks who are too often relegated to the fringes, and the system that benefits from these self-imposed marginalizations. The biggest failure of Reconstruction was allowing the slaver-class to preserve any bit of their prowess instead of crushing it wholesale and building something completely different. I do believe that America is going through yet another renaissance, but instead of meeting the moment, the devils of the ruling class keep forcing us to dance with them at gunpoint. And America’s ankles can only swell so much before we inevitably collapse, if we don’t get shot first.

This was a guest blog written by Chris Sutton, a left-leaning political commentator and activist from the Midwest.