By Johnny Zokovitch
Tomorrow, March 28, more than 3,000 events are planned as part of the growing “No Kings” movement. Previous “No Kings Day” events in June and October 2025 saw millions turn out in protest of the Trump administration’s efforts to detain and deport immigrants, to gut foreign aid, and to rig elections – as well as a slew of other reasons too numerous to list. While the October 2025 rallies mobilized over seven million people, the expectation is that following the murders of protesters Alex Pretti and Renee Good and Trump’s decision to wage war against Iran – even more will turn out this Saturday.
For some of us, we’ll be watching closely to see how close we get to 12 million. What’s so special about 12 million?
In her address to the Pax Christi USA national conference last August (and again when she appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in January), political scientist Maria Stephan explained what she called the “3.5 percent rule.”
“While there is no blueprint for victory – these conflicts are way too complex for that – successful [civil resistance] campaigns featured a few key attributes. First, they built and sustained mass participation, involving a broad range of communities and constituencies. Mass movements with large numbers of students, workers, farmers, merchants, faith groups, and security forces engaged in active defiance are hard to repress! You may have heard about the 3.5 percent rule, based on this research, which holds that no regime has remained in power when 3.5 percent of the population has engaged in active protest.”
And you guessed it! Twelve million people would reach that 3.5 percent threshold, the tipping point that marks the beginning of the end of authoritarian regimes.
Stephan, a member of the advisory council for Pax Christi International’s Catholic Institute for Nonviolence, stresses that to build the kind of mass movement, the organized resistance needs to draw on every nonviolent tool we have in our toolbox.
“Successful movements draw on a wide repertoire of nonviolent tactics. They used tactics of protest and persuasion (marches, demonstrations, symbolic actions), plus more muscular methods of noncooperation (strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience) and the building of alternatives (mutual aid, underground schools and clinics, alternative communications and transportation). More tactics mean more opportunities to get new people involved, more ways to create leverage over oppressive regimes, and more ways to generate and sustain momentum,” Stephan explained at the Pax Christi USA conference in August.
A new article published on The Conversation written by Lisa Schirch, professor of the Practice of Peace Studies, and David Cortright, professor emeritus at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies (both at the University of Notre Dame) makes the case that while the massive number of people showing up for No Kings protests is impressive, more is needed. Their recommendation: large-scale, focused boycotts.
“We believe that protest movements can be more effective when they place more emphasis on boycotts of corporations that support a government’s agenda than on increasing the size and scope of these protests,” write Schirch and Cortright. “That’s because history suggests that boycotts are uniquely suited to expand public participation and reach the scale necessary for political change. Boycotts attract first-time activists with simple ‘buy this, not that’ instructions. They offer easy ways for people to feel heard with little investment of time, money or risk.”
They too point to the “3.5 percent rule” as a goal, and describe how boycotts can get us there.
“If 3.5 percent of a population participates in nonviolent protests or boycotts, it can lead to policy changes… Boycotts could help reach this tipping point.”
Both Stephan and Schirch and Cortright highlight how boycotts are already part and parcel of the strategy – citing for instance the boycott launched by Black faith leaders aimed at Target when they caved to the Trump administration and rolled back DEI initiatives – but also suggesting larger, more coordinated, more focused boycotts are needed.
“The most successful campaigns during the Civil Rights movement, including the bus boycotts and lunch counter sit-ins, were noncooperation campaigns that intentionally targeted white-owned businesses and civic institutions that were propping up racial authoritarianism. They went after the enablers of oppression and were highly successful,” said Stephan. “Today we need to apply the same strategic logic, and focus on the organizations and institutions (including businesses and faith organizations, locally and nationally) that are enabling MAGA authoritarianism and white Christian nationalism.”
“[T]o be effective at their goal of reining in many of Trump’s policies and actions, we believe that this vast movement will likely require a larger, focused boycott that can hurt the revenue and reputation of companies that have financially backed the president or provided support for his policies,” wrote Schrich and Cortright.
Protesting en masse this Saturday is one tool we have. In the weeks and months to follow, let’s use every tool we have in our toolbox.
Johnny Zokovitch is the former executive director of Pax Christi USA. He currently serves on the board of thePax Christi International Fund for Peace and is in pastoral leadership atSt. Cronan Catholic Church in St. Louis. Read more from Johnny at https://johnnyzokovitch.substack.com/and sign up there to receive his articles directly to your email inbox.
The above essay by Johnny Zokovitch has educated me regarding strategy and should be considered by anyone desirous of change. At the rowdy and funky but nevertheless refreshing NO KINGS Saturday event I attended, the most vocal groups demanding an end to foreign wars, which was my purpose for protesting, were disillusioned and readily identifiable MAGA members who invoked Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson as the keepers of the anti-war promise that President Trump has broken. These hardly “progressive”anti-war bedfellows and sisters reminded me of a similar anomaly when decades ago the Black Panthers joined Catholic anti-abortion protesters who, hypocritically and predictably stupidly, did everything possible to distance themselves from the controversial Panthers who correctly and morally saw abortion, overwhelmingly practiced on Black babies, as “murder by the Man.” Alas, as the nuns used to tell us: “the Lord made everyone for a purpose.”
David-Ross Gerling, PhD