Yesterday, as protesters prepared to descend on city squares across America for a mass demonstration branded #NoKings, California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis took to MSNBC, praising the movement as a righteous stand for democracy. “People are very determined to get out there and be seen. This is the United States. We do not want a king,” she said.
What she didn’t say: The California Democratic Party is itself organizing today’s protests — from Orange County to Oakland — with the full institutional weight of the Democratic machine, and the Democratic National Committee is playing a critical role behind the scenes in protests across the country from California to Florida.
Already, I established in analysis for the Pearl Project, a nonprofit journalism initiative, that the protests are organized by 197 organizations aligned with the Democratic Party. This network harnesses a machine of about $2.1 billion in total annual revenues toward this cause. That effort alone represents a partisan political enterprise that I call the protest industrial complex.
Now, in a new analysis of 148 protest listings uploaded on Mobilize.us, a Democratic Party organizing platform, I have established that at least 7,000 Democratic National Committee affiliates are also organizing protests in at least 19 states and the District of Columbia. This is a clear indicator of the partisanship of these protests as an orchestrated, calculated expression of the opposition party, not a spontaneous grassroots outpouring.
Despite the rhetoric of populist uprising, it’s clear: #NoKings is the Democratic Party staging political theater in the streets of America.
As editor-in-chief of the Pearl Project, I have spent the last week building this database of the protest organizers and the findings expose the true architecture of today’s