The next nationwide No Kings action is scheduled for Saturday, October 17, 2026. Millions of people may participate in rallies focused on early voting, voter participation, and protecting election results.
Most people will arrive with signs, comfortable shoes, and the reasonable expectation that nobody should behave like an absolute walnut. Still, responsible protest preparation requires more than optimism.
A protest threat model helps you identify what could realistically go wrong, how likely each problem is, whom it could harm, and what preparation could reduce the risk. It is not a prophecy, panic generator, or corkboard covered in photographs of suspicious men named Chad.
This Resistance Survival Guide explains how to create a practical No Kings protest threat model while respecting the campaign’s commitment to lawful, nonviolent action.
Understand the No Kings Rules
The official No Kings campaign describes its events as lawful and nonviolent. Organizers expect participants to deescalate confrontations, avoid civil disobedience, and leave weapons at home, including weapons that may otherwise be legally permitted.
These rules should shape every safety decision. Your threat model should help people participate within the event’s boundaries. It should not plan secret actions, confrontation, property damage, obstruction, or attempts to evade lawful authorities.
Check the official event listing before leaving home. Confirm the location, time, organizer, route, accessibility information, permitted items, transportation options, and any last minute changes.
What a Protest Threat Model Examines
A useful threat model begins with five questions.
- What are you trying to protect?
- What could harm it?
- How likely is the harm?
- How serious would the consequences be?
- What can you do before the event to reduce the risk?
The protected assets may include people, medical safety, mobility equipment, phones, vehicles, personal information, photographs, evidence, transportation, and the ability to locate companions.
Risks can come from weather, traffic, crowd density, counterprotesters, police activity, surveillance, harassment, misinformation, communication failure, medical emergencies, inaccessible routes, or separation from the group.
The objective is not to eliminate every risk. That is impossible. The objective is to make informed choices and prevent foreseeable problems from becoming emergencies.
Step by Step Guide
Step One: Confirm the Official Event
Locate the event through the official No Kings website and verify its organizer, address, time, route, and event rules.
Do not rely solely on a screenshot, forwarded message, or social media post. Impersonated organizer accounts and outdated event graphics can send people to the wrong location or spread false cancellation claims.
Save the official event page and organizer contact information. Check them again on the morning of October 17.
Step Two: Identify What You Need to Protect
List the people, information, equipment, and essential resources involved in your participation.
Consider children, older adults, disabled participants, immigrants, transgender participants, people with medical conditions, public employees, survivors, and anyone facing an elevated risk from public identification.
Include medications, mobility devices, communication equipment, identification, transportation, and emergency contacts. A threat model that protects a phone but forgets the woman carrying oxygen has misunderstood the assignment spectacularly.
Step Three: Identify Realistic Threats
Write down credible problems connected to the specific event and location. Consider heat, cold, storms, traffic, blocked sidewalks, crowd compression, aggressive drivers, counterprotest activity, law enforcement orders, surveillance, harassment, doxxing, lost companions, dead phone batteries, and unavailable transportation.
Separate documented concerns from rumors. A specific counterprotest announcement is relevant. A stranger claiming that “something huge is coming” without evidence is atmospheric nonsense until verified.
Step Four: Rate Likelihood and Impact
Rate each threat by likelihood and impact. Use simple categories such as low, moderate, or high.
A brief rainstorm may be highly likely but have limited impact. A medical emergency may be less likely but have severe consequences. A confrontation may be unlikely at a small neighborhood rally but more plausible near a heavily promoted counterprotest.
Prioritize threats that are likely, severe, or easy to reduce through preparation.
Step Five: Map the Location
Review the rally site, route, parking, public transportation, sidewalks, intersections, bathrooms, shaded areas, medical facilities, and accessible entrances.
Identify at least two lawful exit routes and a meeting place away from the main crowd. Choose a second meeting place in case streets close or transportation changes.
Do not select restricted property or an isolated alley as your emergency location. Resistance Kitty appreciates drama but prefers exits with lighting and witnesses.
Step Six: Check Weather and Medical Risks
Review the forecast through the National Weather Service and update the plan on the morning of the event.
Bring appropriate water, food, sun protection, rain protection, medication, mobility supplies, and sensory supports. Carry essential medication in its labeled container when practical.
Decide who will call emergency services during a medical crisis. Protest medics can offer limited assistance, but they are not substitutes for licensed emergency care.
Step Seven: Create a Communication Plan
Choose one group communication method and one backup plan. Exchange phone numbers before the event. Establish scheduled check ins and decide what silence should trigger concern.
Write essential contact numbers on paper. Include the event organizer, emergency contact, attorney or legal support number when available, and the number of the person providing transportation.
Do not depend entirely on a group chat. Cellular networks can become overloaded, batteries die, and phones occasionally choose democracy day to begin their personal sabbatical.
Step Eight: Protect Personal Information
The Electronic Frontier Foundation protest security guide recommends considering what information a device contains before bringing it to a demonstration.
Update the device, use a strong passcode, disable unnecessary location sharing, and review what appears on the lock screen. Back up important information before leaving home.
Do not photograph vulnerable participants without permission. Delay posting images when immediate publication could reveal someone’s location. Review backgrounds for faces, license plates, identification cards, or private messages.
Step Nine: Prepare for Counterprotesters
Do not debate hostile people, respond to insults, touch their signs, or follow them when they leave.
Identify event marshals or designated safety volunteers. Move vulnerable participants away from escalating interactions. Document credible threats from a safe location and notify organizers or emergency services when necessary.
Right To Be teaches intervention strategies involving distraction, delegation, documentation, delay, and direct response. The safest option depends on the situation and the wishes of the targeted person.
Step Ten: Understand Protest Rights and Limits
The ACLU protesters’ rights guide explains that speech protections are strongest in traditional public forums such as streets, sidewalks, and parks.
However, officials may enforce lawful restrictions involving traffic, access, noise, permits, and public safety. Private property and university campuses may follow different rules.
Listen carefully to police instructions. Ask whether you are free to leave if an officer stops you. Do not physically resist, threaten officers, or interfere with an arrest.
Step Eleven: Establish Decision Triggers
Decide in advance what conditions would cause you to move, separate from the crowd, contact organizers, or leave.
Triggers might include severe weather, an inaccessible route, crowd compression, escalating confrontation, a dispersal order, loss of transportation, a medical problem, or separation from a dependent person.
Leaving does not mean the protest failed. It means you followed the plan created while your nervous system was not being blasted by sirens and men shouting through competing megaphones.
Step Twelve: Brief Your Group
Before the protest, review the location, meeting points, communication schedule, emergency contacts, accessibility plan, transportation, and exit triggers.
Make sure every participant understands the No Kings commitment to lawful, nonviolent action. Nobody should introduce a surprise tactic involving confrontation, obstruction, property damage, or a badly researched interpretation of constitutional law.
Participants should be able to choose their own level of involvement. No organizer should pressure someone into accepting a risk she has declined.
Step Thirteen: Reassess During the Event
A threat model must change when conditions change.
Observe weather, crowd movement, police positioning, counterprotest activity, transportation, and the condition of your companions. Verify urgent claims through organizers, direct observation, or reliable sources before acting on them.
Do not spread reports of arrests, violence, missing people, or event cancellation until they are confirmed. Panic travels much faster than corrections and requires considerably less evidence.
Step Fourteen: Debrief Afterward
Confirm that everyone reached home safely. Record injuries, harassment, police interactions, threats, transportation failures, accessibility problems, and useful safety measures.
Preserve original photographs and videos when they document a significant incident. Record the date, time, location, witnesses, and context while memories remain fresh.
Share verified concerns with organizers. A threat model becomes more useful when the next event benefits from what participants learned.
Warning Signs of a Bad Threat Model
A poor threat model treats every person as an infiltrator, every helicopter as surveillance, and every technical problem as deliberate interference.
It may also ignore disabled participants, exaggerate dramatic risks, overlook common medical hazards, or collect unnecessary personal information in the name of safety.
Effective preparation is specific, proportionate, evidence based, and respectful of consent. Fear is not a security plan. It is simply fear holding a clipboard.
Closing Kitty Thoughts
A protest threat model does not make No Kings Day risk free. It makes participants better prepared to recognize problems, protect one another, and leave safely when conditions change.
Verify the event. Identify who and what needs protection. Rate realistic threats. Prepare communications, transportation, medical supplies, privacy settings, meeting points, and exit triggers.
Then go make some peaceful democratic noise.
Resistance Kitty does not expect protesters to predict every possible disaster. She merely prefers that the revolution remember sunscreen, medication, and where everyone parked.
Sources
- No Kings Official Website
- No Kings Resource Guide
- No Kings Trainings
- ACLU Protesters’ Rights
- Electronic Frontier Foundation Protest Security Guide
- National Lawyers Guild Legal Observer Program
- Right To Be Bystander Intervention Resources
- National Weather Service
- Nonviolent Peaceforce
- Waging Nonviolence
