Across the United States, an estimated 8 million people attended No Kings rallies on Saturday, setting a new record for attendance on a single day of protests.
California was no exception. Tens of thousands of people attended rallies in the three largest cities of Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco. And while the largest cities will attract the headlines, and this cool "reveal" of crowd size in San Diego, the dozens (or maybe even hundreds) of rallies in smaller cities inflate the state's numbers and make the rallies accessible to just about everyone.
As SBCA did for the first two No Kings rallies, here are some of the highlights from up and down the state.
Eureka is one of the northernmost cities in the state but the city has participated in all three No Kings events.
Moving South to Sacramento, an estimated 1,000 marched through the Downtown to the Capitol to protest not the state government but the federal one.
Across the San Francisco Bay Area, this weekend’s “No Kings” protests drew large, region-wide crowds spanning multiple cities, continuing a pattern of mass mobilization seen in earlier iterations of the movement. In San Francisco, demonstrators gathered at Embarcadero Plaza before marching down Market Street to Civic Center.
Oakland saw a major rally centered at Frank Ogawa Plaza, reflecting steady growth from prior protests that had already reached into the thousands. In Berkeley, smaller but still significant actions added to the regional turnout, echoing earlier events that drew crowds in the high hundreds to thousands.
Meanwhile, San Jose anchored South Bay participation with its own sizable gathering, part of a broader network of demonstrations stretching across Silicon Valley.
Between the Bay and the media center in Southern California No Kings was a common activity.
The San Luis Obispo Tribune and Fresno Bee both announced that "thousands" of people participated in the rallies in their home cities. Smaller cities such as Bakersfield and Stockton were among the cities that participated in the Central Valley.
Down in Los Angeles, there were tens of thousands of protestors, and reports of some altercations between protestors and police (who made ~75 arrests) , an outlier in what was a mostly peaceful day across the country. Another No Kings protest near Trump National Golf Course in Rancho Palos Verdes drew some heated moments between protestors and golfers, but there were no reports of violence.
But that shouldn't take away from the hundreds of thousands of No Kings demonstrators that gathered in dozens of cities throughout the county. Smaller cities such as Santa Monica, Torrance, Culver City each bragged attracting 1,000 people, while Long Beach announced the popular attendance figure of "thousands."
The main Southern California event was in downtown Los Angeles, where the Times estimated 100,000 people took part in the rally.
The Fullerton Observer noted that there were over a dozen rallies held throughout Orange County including Santa Ana, Anaheim, and even deep-red Newport Beach.
In San Diego, the “No Kings” protest emerged as one of the largest in California, with tens of thousands of demonstrators converging downtown for a massive, peaceful march. Centered around the waterfront and civic core, the rally drew a broad cross-section of participants carrying signs and chanting against authoritarianism.
The crowd in downtown was estimated as "over 40,000 people" and with the total for San Diego County pushing 100,000.
Either way, San Diego was one of the largest single-city turnouts of the weekend. The scale and energy of the demonstration underscored San Diego’s growing role as a hub for large civic protests, even though it's one of California's "purple cities."
