Local organizers for the anti-authoritarian “No Kings” movement are preparing for peaceful demonstrations against President Donald Trump this weekend, with rallies in Pittsburgh joining those in other cities across the U.S. Part of the advance work involves pushing back on claims by some high-level Republicans who have sought to portray the demonstrations as dangerous, “pro-terror” events led by paid protesters.
“We call it the Hate America Rally,” U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson said earlier this week. “Let’s see who shows up for that. I bet you’ll see pro-Hamas supporters, I bet you’ll see antifa types, I bet you’ll see the Marxists on full display.”
Republicans’ comments, said social worker and Indivisible Pittsburgh director Tracy Baton, are an “intentional” attempt to counter what is expected to be a massive protest against President Donald Trump.
The tactic is “not rhetoric,” Baton added, but a pretext for efforts to clamp down on people’s rights to free speech and peaceful assembly.
“No Kings” is meant to “empower Pittsburgh to resist authoritarianism, fascism, and the destruction of democracy” nonviolently, Baton said. But, she added, “Tell big enough and vicious enough lies and invite people to come out and be the worst they can be, and they’ll believe you.”
Indivisible Pittsburgh has organized one of several rallies locally this weekend, and has been active in previous events since Trump returned to office.
The first “No Kings” events held in June marked one of the largest days of protest in American history. Demonstrations in Pittsburgh — as with most across the U.S. — were nonviolent.
Trump has used similar false allegations to justify deploying the National Guard to several Democrat-controlled cities after claiming, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that they are burning, “lawless” “war zones.”
U.S. Rep. Summer Lee is slated to speak at the Saturday rally. She condemned Republicans’ comments, arguing they are meant to discourage dissent and undermine free speech at events that have been overwhelmingly peaceful.
“What he’s trying to do is to say, ‘Those people who oppose me are inherently unpatriotic, inherently un-American,’” Lee said. “That is the move of an authoritarian. That is the actual un-American thing to do. It is un-American to say that Americans cannot protest their government.”
Lee called the administration’s continued rejection of the rule of law a “stress test.”
“They step their toe on the line and they see how far they can go,” she said. “And the more and more lines we allow [Trump] to cross, the more and more he knows we’ll tolerate.”
Protests like the “No Kings” demonstrations “can play a vital role in sending a message not only to the Trump administration, but to other elected officials that what they are doing to people in this country is not okay,” said Vic Walczac, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.
“Large public expressions of dissent against the government are an important and time-honored tactic to promote social change,” he added.
It’s not the first time that Trump administration critics have derided a protest as potentially violent without evidence, said Lara Putnam, a Pitt history professor who studies grassroots political movements in Pennsylvania.
The accusation that “antifa,” or anti-fascist, protesters are preparing to riot and cause violence was also mobilized during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, she said. Accusations like this can have real impacts, she added — some organizers during that wave of protest received death threats, and armed unidentified conservative counterprotesters showed up at some demonstrations across the country.
“People firmly believed that these protests were going to be violent or that the protest organizers were seeking violence, because that’s what they had heard,” she said.
“Claims that protestors are gonna become violent themselves can lead to volatile situations, and definitely have a chilling impact on free speech, and also push more responsibility onto protestors … to minimize any risk of violence.”
Rhetoric equating the left with “terrorism,” as has been seen from some Trump administration spokespeople in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, is concerning in a historical and international context, she noted.
“That’s just a dangerous development for any country, for the political leadership in charge to be equating their mainstream nonviolent opposition, to be claiming that there are terrorists,” she said, comparing it to language used by Vladimir Putin in Russia.
“It’s a sort of standard part of authoritarian regimes cracking down, and taking away core civil liberties and core freedoms of the press. The international record suggests that one should be quite concerned when a regime in power starts using these highly inflammatory accusations about coordinated violence on the other side.”
Baton echoed similar worries. “We are [a] democracy and we will take our democracy back,” she said. “I am concerned that [the Trump administration] is seeking a fundamental transformation of our country.”