June 14, 2024: https://indepthnh.org/2025/06/14/no-kings-kick-out-the-clowns-day-in-nh/

By Arnie Alpert, Active with the Activists

Arnie Alpert spent decades as a community organizer/educator in NH movements for social justice and peace.  Officially retired since 2020, he keeps his hands (and feet) in the activist world while writing about past and present social movements.

Demonstrations on June 14 against President Donald Trump’s performative militarism were well in the works across New Hampshire and throughout the country before he ordered troops into the streets of Los Angeles to suppress dissent against his mass deportation agenda.  According to organizers, 2100 demonstrations are now planned nationwide and at least 32 in New Hampshire to coincide with Trump’s Flag Day military parade and birthday celebration in Washington on Saturday.

The parade, which officials estimate will cost $25 million to $45 million and critics say could cost twice as much, is expected to involve 6600 soldiers, 50 aircraft, and 150 vehicles, including tanks on the streets of the nation’s capital.  Failing to acknowledge the constitutional and historic right to dissent, the president said Tuesday, “For those people that want to protest, they’re going to be met with very big force.” 

But Washington, DC is not expected to be the site of major protests.  Instead, people will take to the streets and parks in small towns and major cities from Houlton, Maine to Naalehu, Hawaii, and Kotzebue, Alaska to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.  In New Hampshire, demonstrations will take place in all ten counties. (see list below)

Most of the demonstrations, to be held in town and city parks as well as at busy intersections, will spotlight Trump’s authoritarian measures with the theme, “No Kings.”     

“The No Kings mobilizations on June 14 were already planned as a peaceful stand against authoritarian overreach and the gross abuse of power this Administration has shown,” national organizers said in a June 8 news release representing a coalition of more than 200 national and local groups.  “Now, this military escalation only confirms what we’ve known: this government wants to rule by force, not serve the people. From major cities to small towns, we’ll rise together and say: we reject political violence. We reject fear as governance. We reject the myth that only some deserve freedom.”

Other demonstrations have adopted the theme, “Kick Out the Clowns,” saying, “When you elect clowns, they don’t become leaders. The country becomes a circus.”  Their protests, connected to the national Women’s March organization, are expected to employ ridicule as a way to challenge the legitimacy of Trump’s actions.

Some of New Hampshire’s demonstrations have adopted both the No Kings and No Clowns slogans.   

The State House in Concord, where the largest New Hampshire anti-Trump demonstrations have taken place, will celebrate Pride Month at the same time it denounces authoritarianism.  Titled “No Kings, But Yaaas Queens!” the Concord rally will be “a call for liberation from systems of oppression,” according to NH 50501, the sponsoring group.

The rally, which will be on the State House lawn from 1 to 5 pm, will “lift up LGBTQIA+ voices while also creating space for intersectional issues including immigration justice, international policy, racial equity, and broader social change. It is both a celebration and a call to action,” according to NH 50501.   

As dissent and a militarized response escalated in Los Angeles, about 100 demonstrators assembled outside the Nashua District Court on Tuesday evening to denounce deportation and the dispatch of soldiers to the nation’s streets.  Another “ICE OUT” demonstration is planned for Friday, with a march assembling at 6 pm at the corner of Commercial and Granite Streets in Manchester.  “The Trump administration and its allies are intentionally fanning the flames of a constitutional crisis by acting as an occupying force on contested territory; treating the people of L.A., our fellow Americans, as if they were foreign combatants launching an invasion,” march organizers said in a news release Thursday.  

Among the speakers in Nashua was Faisal Khan, who decried Trump’s dehumanization of immigrants and militarization of the administration’s reaction to dissent.  It’s not just about immigration, he said.  “This is about whether the rule of law, human rights, and democratic norms means anything anymore. It is about whether our country can tolerate the truth that we are governed by fear, not justice, by spectacle, not principle, by a ruling class willing to trade lies for power. We need mass, lawful, peaceful, nonviolent resistance, now more than ever before.”

“It takes just three percent of the population, yes, three percent, or around 15 million Americans coming together to bring the system to a halt,” he told a cheering crowd.

The three percent figure, or the more often cited 3.5 percent figure, comes from research conducted by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, scholars who have scoured reports from across the decades and around the world and concluded that nonviolent social movements can bring down autocrats with mobilizations of what may seem to be relatively small segments of the population.  

“From 1900 to 2006, I don’t know of any nonviolent mass movements for democracy that failed after achieving 3.5% active participation in a peak moment of that movement’s cycle,” Chenoweth said in a recent interview. 

Writing last week on JustSecurity.org, Stephan said, “Civil resistance ‘works’ by raising the costs of tyranny and systematically removing the sources of power for an autocrat and his enablers. All authoritarian regimes rely on support from key institutions in society, including political parties, businesses, unions, religious organizations, bureaucracies, courts, media outlets, and security forces. When members of these pillars stop cooperating with the regime – workers deny their labor and skills, businesses withhold financial contributions, bureaucrats do things slowly or ineffectively, faith organizations stop providing moral approval, soldiers defy orders to use violence against protestors – it becomes difficult or impossible for autocrats to stay in power.”

The statistics cited by scholars may not have precise predictive value, but the protest movement appears to still be growing, and growing more with the administration’s continued assaults on democratic norms.  No Kings demonstrations will take place this weekend in communities like Orford and Acworth that have not hosted protests on recent national “days of action.”  Weekly protests are taking place in numerous communities, including Wolfeboro, Kingston, Portsmouth, Keene, and Concord.  A newly formed group, NH-Forward, lists 12 communities where “Walk Out Wednesday” actions take place each week.  Despite Elon Musk’s departure from the White House, “Tesla Takedowns” continue in Portsmouth on Lafayette Rd. near the company’s showroom every Saturday.

According to Elissa Paquette, the Wolfeboro group has stood at Pickering Corner “on windy, freezing days, rainy days, no matter the weather,” with participants from Wolfeboro, Tuftonboro, Alton, Moultonboro, Sandwich and Wakefield. 

Another new development is the NH Bridge Brigade for Democracy, which is organizing teams of volunteers to hold banners on overpasses on the state’s major highways.  According to Jamie Cunningham, they expect to have several hundred volunteers holding banners with messages like “No to Fascism” and “RESIST” visible to northbound traffic on Saturday morning.   Cunningham expects motorists to see banners on many of the bridges over I-93, I-95, I-89, and Rte. 101. 

Groups in Conway and Derry are planning marches Saturday, in addition to holding rallies and waving signs at busy intersections.  

One factor binding protests together is a commitment to nonviolence.  “All No Kings events adhere to a shared commitment to nonviolent protest and community safety. Organizers are trained in de-escalation and are working closely with local partners to ensure peaceful and powerful actions nationwide,” according to the website promoting the rallies Saturday.

No Kings/Kick Out the Clowns Day NH

 June 14, 2025

1. Acworth – noon to 1pm, Town Hall
2. Alton – 10am to noon, 12 Alton Circle.
3. Charlestown – 1 to 3 pm, 226 Main St.
4. Colebrook – 10am to noon, 143 Main St.
5. Concord – 1 to 5pm, State House
6. Conway – 10am to 12:30pm, Conway Visitors Center
7. Derry – 1 to 3pm, 14 Manning St.
8. Dover – 11am to 1pm, corner Washington St. and Central Av.
9. Dover – 3 to 4pm, 238 Indian Brook Rd.
10. Enfield – 3:30 to 4:30pm, Huse Park
11. Gorham – 12 to 4pm, Jct of Rte 2 and 16
12. Hanover – 9 to 11:30am, 53 Lyme Rd.
13.  Jaffrey – 10am to 1pm, Jct Rtes 124 and 202
14. Keene – 1 to 4pm, 312 Washington St, Fuller Park
15. Kingston – 11am to 1pm, across from Kingston State Park
16. Lebanon – 12 to 1:30pm, Lyman Bridge
17. Littleton – 3 to 5pm, 274 Dells Rd.
18. Manchester – 2 to 4 pm, City Hall Plaza
19. Milford – 2 to 4pm, Milford Oval
20. Nashua – 2 to 4pm, Soldiers and Sailors Monument
21. New London – 1 to 3pm, Town Green
22. Orford – 10:30am to noon, Samuel Morey Memorial Bridge
23. Pelham – 10am to 1pm, 6 Main St.
24. Peterborough – 12 to 1:30pm, Jct Rtes 101 and 202
25. Plaistow – 1 to 3pm, Town Hall
26. Plymouth – 11am to 1pm, Main St.
27. Portsmouth – 10 to 11 am, Tesla Takedown, 2454 Lafayette Rd.
28. Portsmouth – 12 to 2pm, Prescott Park  
29. Portsmouth – 2 to 4pm, intersection of Islington, Congress, Maplewood, Middle Streets
30. Salem – 12 to 3pm, Corner of Main and Bridge Streets.
31. Walpole – 10am to noon, 12 Huntington Lane
32. Wolfeboro – 12 to 2pm, Pickering Corner

Other No Kings actions will take place in border towns such as Bellows Falls and Newbury VT and Haverhill, Tyngsboro, and Amesbury MA.

For more information, see NoKings.org and Women’s March.