No Kings? More like “no electricity”

At least 33 separate groups (and at least 27 additional affiliates of same) that participated in the “No Kings” protests of June and October are opponents of nuclear energy. The combined annual revenue of these NGOs is $509 million, and likely far more.

The ironic punchline is that many if not most of these protesters have attended the Church of the Perpetual Climate Panic and nuclear power is our largest source of electricity that does not produce CO₂ emissions. By a large margin, nuclear is the cleanest and safest reliable and abundant fuel that we have. It is cleaner even than unreliable and weather restricted wind and solar.

But irony and awful message discipline have been recurring features of the No Kings demonstrations against the Trump administration.

First, every grade-schooler knows we don’t have a monarch. They also know that a president elected behind a decisive margin in the electoral college just a year ago isn’t one.

Additionally, most of the No Kings protesters voted for Trump’s predecessor, whose mental incapacity made him unable to even perform as president, let alone royalty. And to patch up that problem they voted for a replacement presidential nominee who—much like a queen—was coronated without winning a single primary.

Layered atop all of that, Trump’s critics have spent the last decade claiming he is a fascist dictator, but now want us to believe he is trying instead to become a king? People, please make up your mind!

Whatever it has been trying to accomplish, the No Kings movement has inadvertently managed to create the largest American gathering of nuclear energy opponents since the Cold War.

The big names

Indivisible . . . denounced nuclear power as an example of “dirty energy” 

Leading the list is Indivisible, an NGO purpose-built in 2017 to launch protests against the Trump administration. In its last filing with the IRS (covering 2023) Indivisible listed annual revenue of more than $12.5 million. At least 13 local Indivisible chapters are also listed as partners on the No Kings event pages, and presumably some have raised local revenue that can be added to the loot raked in by the national group.

According to the InfluenceWatch profile:

Indivisible was one of more than 600 co-signing organizations on a January 2019 open letter to Congress titled “Legislation to Address the Urgent Threat of Climate Change.” The signatories declared their support for new laws to bring about “100 percent decarbonization” of the transportation sector but denounced nuclear power as an example of “dirty energy” that should not be included in any legislation promoting the use of so-called “renewable energy.”

The No Kings partner lists also include at least a dozen anti-energy climate NGOs with a history of opposing nuclear power—in some cases a long history. Here are the twelve with their most recently reported annual revenue:

• Sierra Club ($4 million)
• League of Conservation Voters ($5 million)
• Greenpeace ($2 million)
• Center for Biological Diversity ($5 million)
• 350.org ($19.5 million)
• Friends of the Earth ($9 million)
• Center for International Environmental Law ($3 million)
• Oil Change International ($8 million)
• Sunrise Movement ($5 million)
• Labor Network for Sustainability ($2 million)
• Conservation Colorado Education Fund ($7 million)
• Climate Hawks Vote ($127,000)

In its lists of partners for the two protests that have occurred thus far, No Kings lists at least eight additional NGOs affiliated with the League of Conservation Voters, two more 350.org NGOs, and one extra Friends of the Earth group. These partners were not minor participants

Surprising names

Like Indivisible, the League of Women Voters was a cosigner on the January 2019 anti-nuclear letter listed above.

One of the surprising angles of the American anti-nuclear movement is the support it receives from NGOs that don’t have an obvious axe to grind against a safe, clean and limitless source of carbon free energy.

The League of Women Voters ($8.1 million) has built up a misleading reputation for being a neutral, nonpartisan, voter information NGO. This myth should be easy to dismiss by pointing to LWV’s partnership in the No Kings protests.

But the group’s opposition to nuclear power should stand as another clue. Like Indivisible, LWV was a cosigner on the January 2019 anti-nuclear letter listed above. In addition, the LWV profile at InfluenceWatch includes this:

The League’s 2018-2020 policy positions guide stated that the organization generally opposed “increased reliance on nuclear fission” for electrical power production. The policy document stated that state and local affiliates are permitted to “oppose licensing for construction of nuclear power plants based off the national position.” The document did not permit the affiliates to support expansion of nuclear energy production unless there was a unique concern, and the affiliate had obtained “prior permission from the national board.”

The American Friends Service Committee (a Quaker NGO) is listed as a No Kings partner. AFSC reported $41.1 million in operating revenue for 2024. According to the InfluenceWatch profile:

In May of 2021, AFSC was one of 715 groups and businesses listed as a co-signer on a letter to the leadership of the U.S. House and Senate that referred to nuclear energy as a “dirty” form of energy production and a “significant” source of pollution. The letter asked federal lawmakers to reduce carbon emissions by creating a “renewable electricity standard” that promoted production of weather dependent power sources such as wind turbines and solar panels, but did not promote low carbon natural gas and zero carbon nuclear energy.

As with AFSC, Faithful America ($546,000) is another religious group listed as a No Kings partner. According to the InfluenceWatch profile:

Faithful America was a cosigner on an April 2021 letter to then-President Joe Biden that asked the administration to promote weather-dependent wind and solar power systems and “end the fossil fuel era.” The letter also advised the president to “Phase out nuclear energy as an inherently dirty, dangerous and costly energy source.”

Food & Water Watch ($22.3 million) is opposed to both non-existent Kings and safe, reliable, carbon free power. According to InfluenceWatch:

FWW rejects nuclear energy. In November 2020, it co-signed a letter to the U.S. Senate stating that nuclear energy “amplifies and expands the dangers of climate change” and another in May 2021 that referred to nuclear energy as “dirty” and a “significant” source of pollution.”

Like the League of Women Voters, Physicians for Social Responsibility ($1.6 million) has a name that sounds pleasant. But a closer look reveals a long list of stridently left-leaning policies that make PSR an obvious ally for the No Kings demonstrations. The NGO’s website has a page dedicated to its opposition to nuclear power.

Useful idiots against energy

No Kings is an anti-energy movement. All available evidence overwhelmingly points that way, with little to zero mitigation.

Rounding out the list of known enemies of nuclear energy participating in the No Kings protests is a lot of less-known, left-leaning groups: People’s Action Institute, Corporate Accountability International, Public Citizen, Bend the Arc, Florida Rising, Our Revolution, Free Press Action Fund, Peace Action, Progressive Democrats of America, Veterans for Peace, RootsAction, Revolving Door Project, New York Progressive Action Network, 198 Methods and Climate Action Now – Western Massachusetts.

There are no obvious supporters of nuclear power among the 200-plus names on the No Kings partner lists.

And it’s not as if those NGOs do not exist. The Nature Conservancy actively promotes a major expansion of nuclear, precisely because it does not produce greenhouse gas emissions. But TNC has not been listed as a No Kings partner.

On the other hand, of the No Kings partners not listed above, some have such restrictive positions on nuclear power that they are functionally, if not explicitly, opposed.

The lead candidate here is the Union of Concerned Scientists ($41.9 million). The UCS has a clear past history of supporting closure of nuclear plants. And while the NGO no longer calls for the closure of specific nuclear stations, it has retained alarmist talking points about the technology that are largely indistinguishable from strident enemies such as the Sierra Club.

Merely adding UCS to this account would push the combined annual revenue of the “No Kings” nuclear energy abolitionists closer to $600 million. (The entire American anti-nuclear movement has a combined annual revenue of more than $3.3 billion.)

As noted above, it’s also difficult to identify a single No Kings event partner that promotes nuclear power and defends it against the zealots who oppose it.

If we look at the NGOs on the center-left and further left that take positions on energy matters, then the overwhelming majority also promote big restrictions on the use of hydrocarbon fuels: oil, natural gas and coal. If this analysis were expanded to the NGOs that have an anti-hydrocarbon position (they like to say “fossil fuels”) then the anti-energy caucus within No Kings would likely include at least half of the partners, and perhaps a supermajority.

This is a big deal.

Added together, nuclear plus the hydrocarbons fuel 78 percent of American electricity output and 91 percent of our total energy consumption (electricity plus transportation, home heating, industry and the rest). Without these fuels, industrial civilization grinds to a halt, and the most fortunate among us will lose only our jobs, wealth and standard of living. The unlucky ones will die.

So, by default, No Kings is an anti-energy movement. All available evidence overwhelmingly points that way, with little to zero mitigation. The 60 stridently anti-nuclear partners merely add an exclamation point on the assertion.

These event partners do not prove that every No Kings protester was an anti-energy zealot. It would be surprising if this were so, because the protests were aimed at a non-existent king rather than the energy that keeps us alive and prosperous.

But for the No Kings demonstrators who don’t share this anti-energy ideology, the best we can say of them is that they have been used as useful idiots.