Springsteen to Perform at Minnesota's 'No Kings' Rally

Minnesota will be the flagship of the "No Kings" protest movement Saturday when Bruce Springsteen performs "Streets of Minneapolis" in a state where emotions are still raw over President Trump's immigration crackdown and the deaths of two residents shot by federal officers, the AP reports. More than 3,100 events are being organized in communities large and small across all 50 states, with more than 9 million people expected to participate. A growing number of them will be in suburbs, which are increasingly on the front lines of resistance against Trump.

Organizers have designated the Minnesota rally, at the State Capitol in St. Paul, as Saturday's flagship event. They've told a state oversight agency that 100,000 people could converge on the Capitol complex, where last June's event drew an estimated 80,000 people. The movement is spreading around the world, said Ezra Levin, a cofounder of Indivisible, the activist group spearheading the events. Rallies are also planned in more than a dozen other countries, he said in an interview, including Canada, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Ireland, Sweden, Mexico, and Australia. In countries with constitutional monarchies, he said, they call the protests "No Tyrants."

Besides Springsteen, the St. Paul rally will also feature singer Joan Baez and actor Jane Fonda, who've been noted for their activism since the Vietnam War era, and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a hero of the progressive movement, along with a long list of other national and local activists, labor leaders, and elected officials. Levin said the national organizers chose Minnesota because it was subject to "some of the most horrific, sadistic behavior you can imagine" from the Trump administration. "At the same time, in the Twin Cities earlier this year, we saw some of the most inspiring, neighborly, brave organizing that we've seen anywhere in the country, and it serves as an inspiration to all of us," Levin added.