Silenced in the Streets: What the No Kings Protests Left Behind

by Susan Katz Keating

The No Kings protests advocate for people who live on the margins. We found the ones they pushed aside.

The bomb went off on a Saturday afternoon in a town center full of shoppers.

Omagh. August 1998. Twenty-nine people and two unborn children who had nothing to do with any of it died on a street. It was the single deadliest attack of the entire Troubles. It occurred months after the Good Friday Agreement led most of us to believe the worst was over. The bombers did not accept the agreement. The shoppers paid the bill.

I had grown up inside the Troubles and covered them as a journalist. I knew what it meant to read a room before you opened your mouth. I had seen people beaten savagely, cars explode, buildings burn. In all that time, I felt nothing. It was weather.

Omagh broke through that weather.

I have thought about those shoppers in the decades since. I have thought about them every time I saw a movement lose the thread between expressing grievance and enacting rage — and ripple outward, to reach the people standing nearest to it.

I thought about them on March 28, 2026.

In the weeks leading up to that date — the third national “No Kings” day of action — one of my reporters was covering an anti-ICE event in Minneapolis. He was doing what reporters do: asking questions. Specifically, he asked a small group: who is a fascist?

The answer came back: You are. And then: We shoot fascists.

I was on the phone with him. I heard the exchange in real time. I pulled him out. Later, someone approached him and said they were scared on his behalf, but they wouldn’t go on record saying it.

“We can’t speak out against the protesters,” the man said. “We live here. They know how to find us.”

The exchange is documented on a thumb drive. So is everything else we collected reporting this story. Copies exist in multiple locations, in the hands of people I trust. I learned to do that in Belfast, in Derry, and in Belgrade. You keep the record. You keep it safe. You keep it somewhere they cannot find it.

On March 28, Soldier of Fortune went back out. We had reporters on the ground in Los Angeles and Minneapolis, and I personally was present in St. Petersburg, Florida. We didn’t go to hear what the protesters were saying. We wanted to know what was happening to the people around them.

What we found, in every city where we had eyes on the ground, was the same story wearing different clothes.

The Tools Change. The Chaos Doesn’t.

The main rally at Gloria Molina Grand Park was held in conjunction with a march through downtown Los Angeles. Organizers had prepared for crowds. Officials had, too. Gates were placed ahead of time on freeway on-ramps, to prevent a repeat of previous protests where marchers had walked onto highway lanes.

The main event ended. Some in the crowd moved to Alameda Street, outside the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal facility downtown. What followed was not protest. People tried to kick down the fence that blocked off the facility. They threw rocks, bottles, and chunks of concrete at federal officers. 

“It was urban combat assault,” said reporter Jose Campos, who covers security for Soldier of Fortune. “And ordinary people were caught up in it.”

One woman, Maria, told Campos she works a few blocks away from the facility, and could not avoid the chaos.

“I tried to stay out of their way,” said Maria, whose boss told her and other employees not to make comments on social media or speak to reporters. “I didn’t move fast enough. One of them pushed me.” 

In the rush to get away from the crowd, Maria said her bag disappeared from her shoulder. She never got it back. She didn’t report it. 

“I don’t want to put it on record,” she said. “My name would be on it.” 

She was doing what I do. Keeping herself safe.

Two officers were struck by cement blocks and required medical treatment. The Los Angeles Police Department declared a tactical alert. They used tear gas. They told people to disperse. By the end of the night, 75 people had been arrested.  

The woman arrested in a Statue of Liberty costume was smiling as an officer led her away. 

“Does anyone think it’s a joke?” said Martin Albertson, a local resident who spoke to Campos on Sunday. “This isn’t funny.”

The group raising havoc on Alameda didn’t talk to Campos. I tell my reporters to stay out of the line of fire, and to give a wide berth to people in the midst of a mission. The group on Alameda didn’t talk to the locals ahead of time either, Albertson said.

“Did they want to know what we thought? The ones who work and live nearby? Did they ask?”

I already knew the answer. I had heard it from shopkeepers in Belfast and farmers in Armagh and parents walking their children past checkpoints in Derry. They thought about tomorrow. They thought about whether they could open the shop, walk to school, get the children inside before it started again. They did not think about the cause. They were too busy thinking about how to get through the day.

Nobody asked Maria what she thought. Nobody asked Martin Albertson. Nobody asked the people who open their shops on that street every morning.

The Fog Looks the Same in Every City.

The flagship event of No Kings Day was not in Minneapolis. It was across the river in St. Paul, at the State Capitol, where a crowd gathered to hear Bruce Springsteen and listen to Governor Tim Walz, Senator Bernie Sanders, and Jane Fonda. 

Our reporter was in Minneapolis.

“It wasn’t a bunch of people talking about fascists this time,” Jake told me. “No one called me a fascist or told me to fuck off. No one threatened to kill me.”

What he found instead was a different kind of pressure.

Jake did not encounter protesters or counterprotesters. He spoke to people who lived outside the small district where the main action occurred throughout the winter. They were residents of a city that has been the epicenter of confrontation between federal immigration enforcement and street-level resistance for months. They had watched all of it. And on the day the nation’s eyes turned to their city to celebrate resistance, they spoke to a reporter from Soldier of Fortune — quietly, off the record, because they did not feel they could speak any other way.

“Thank God they held it somewhere else,” one business owner said. “We couldn’t handle even the risk of something getting stirred up. Do we allow ICE to be customers? Do we ban them? Is someone always watching what we do?”

“That’s the problem,” a manager said. “They are watching.” 

Others told Jake and me that they felt intimidated into taking sides; that they had to post premade signs saying ICE is banned from being customers. 

Some of the signs were handed out by a group called Monarca. 

I reached out repeatedly to Monarca. I told them that people said they felt intimated into posting their signs. No one returned my many phone calls and messages, including those sent on January 17 and February 26. No response was received prior to publication.

We have not documented that the intimidation was deliberate. We know what people told us.

Aside from the signs, others in Minneapolis told us they simply could not talk. 

“It’s not in our best interests,” the manager said. “We live here. We’re better off staying quiet.”

I know what that looks like. In Northern Ireland, during the worst years, there were entire communities where speaking to the wrong person about the wrong thing in the wrong tone of voice could cause you more than your livelihood. You learned to read the room. You learned whose presence meant safety and whose meant the opposite. You learned, if you were very unlucky, that those two categories could be the same person.

The people Jake spoke to echoed those sentiments.

Their words are on a thumb drive. Stored separately from their identities, which we will not publish. We made that promise in the field and we are keeping it here.

This Could Be Any Street Where Someone Decided to Have Their Conflict on Someone Else’s Ground.

Florida held more than 100 No Kings events scheduled statewide on March 28. In St. Petersburg, the main event was a morning rally at Tyrone Square. Demonstrators lined several blocks, chanting and holding signs. 

I was there.

I didn’t see anyone getting arrested. I saw no violence. What I did not expect was what I found on the edges of it. People who don’t live anywhere, except wherever they find a spot to sleep. For them, the protest meant loss.

“I got pushed off,” one man told me. “They didn’t make me leave. They didn’t hit me or nuthin. But I couldn’t do nuthin.”

“I lost my day’s takings,” another man said.

The conversations took place after the fact, outside a local restaurant that sells food to anyone who pays for it. On March 28, two men who feed themselves by collecting money from strangers were not able to pay for it. 

The protesters in St. Petersburg would seem to align with people who live on the margins. The two men I spoke to occupy about as marginal a position as American society offers. They work the corners to varying degrees of success. On March 28, they were in the way.

Again, I thought about Northern Ireland. Farmers in Armagh, where milk churns were viewed as holding bombs whether they did or not. Shopkeepers in Belfast who boarded their windows not because they supported the British or opposed them but because the glass kept breaking and glass costs money and nobody on either side of the argument was offering to pay for it. I thought about what it means to be the person standing on the ground where someone else has decided to express their views or have their conflict — not a combatant, not a sympathizer, just someone who was already there when the march, or the army, or the mob arrived and needed the space you were occupying.

Keep the Record. Keep It Safe. Keep It Somewhere They Can’t Find It.

In Los Angeles, the violence was open, with federal officers bleeding, tear gas in the streets, and 75 arrests. In Minneapolis, residents wanted to speak and wouldn’t, not with their names attached. In St. Petersburg, homeless people lost their spots on corners they depend on to survive, to protesters who appeared to support those who live in the margins.

In Northern Ireland, the Good Friday Agreement did not happen because grievance went away. It happened because enough people on enough sides decided that the cost of the mechanism — the funerals, the bombings, the children growing up viewing violence as casually as if it were weather — was higher than the cost of the negotiation. It took 30 years. It cost lives. Including in Omagh, after peace officially was  settled. The shopkeepers and the farmers and the schoolchildren. The Saturday afternoon shoppers in Omagh. They paid most of the bill.

They always do. They live on the margins of conflict, and their costs are not considered. 

In every city where Soldier of Fortune had a reporter on the ground, we found someone quieter who had been pushed aside — a journalist threatened with lethal language for asking a question, residents afraid to speak in their own city, the homeless moved off their corners by a protest that decries the power of kings.

All of it is documented. All of it is stored. In more than one place. I learned to do that in Belfast. I learned it from people who understood that the record is the only thing that survives when everything else is ash. The thumb drive is in a safe place. So is everything on it. So are the names we promised not to print.

They are the ones standing in the light of someone else’s fire, wondering if they will be able to open the shop in the morning.

For the full account of the Minneapolis threat against our reporter, Jake, see ‘We Shoot Fascists’: A Soldier of Fortune Correspondent Was Threatened Before He Asked One Question.

This article was reported by Jose Campos, Jake, and Susan Katz Keating, the publisher and editor in chief of Soldier of Fortune.