After the “No Kings” rallies and protests swept the nation over the weekend, many conservatives could not help but notice one surprising demographic trend about the events.
Common knowledge would assert that large, left-of-center, anti-Trump protests in major cities would attract a sizable share of energized progressive youth.
But the opposite seemed to be the case for “No Kings” rally attendees.
“I’m sorry but how is NO ONE in the media talking about how EVERY PERSON at these ‘grassroots’ protests are just old, wrinkled, white boomers??” podcast host Isabel Brown asked in a viral Instagram post.
“These people aren’t punk rock, anti-establishment protesters. They quite literally *are* the establishment. Go home, Grandma,” she quipped.
Conservative activist Robby Starbuck noticed the same phenomenon in his own post on X.
“Here’s a sampling of No Kings protesters. The big divide is that these elderly people still get their news from legacy media and they believe it,” he said while sharing pictures of the attendees.
“They do limited to no questioning of what they’re told to believe,” he added. “That won’t change but their influence is dying while ours grows.”
Is the left truly losing the youth vote?
Starbuck was reacting to a comment from Daily Wire journalist Megan Basham: “My husband points out that in all the photos of the No Kings protests, the crowds are not only elderly but almost exclusively white. That’s interesting.”
Here’s a sampling of No Kings protesters. The big divide is that these elderly people still get their news from legacy media and they believe it. They do limited to no questioning of what they’re told to believe. That won’t change but their influence is dying while ours grows. https://t.co/6X8u97s4OX pic.twitter.com/aWPJf3Litq
— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) June 16, 2025
The hosts of the City Journal Podcast made similar observations.
“I’ll be honest, my impression of the protest is that they were both more peaceful than I expected and also much more geriatric than I expected,” Charles Fain Lehman said.
“It kind of seemed like it was a lot of Boomers who were protesting, which was interesting as a demographic phenomenon,” he continued.
Daniel Di Martino juxtaposed the “No Kings” protests to the social justice movement, which took place five years ago.
“If you think about it, the 2020 protests and like everything before, it was young people, right?” he noted. “And now it’s almost as if the Democratic base is the Boomers or at least the most engaged people of the base.”
Lehman added that the typical pattern of young people being more liberal and old people being more conservative still holds up, but there is a “cohort effect” today in which “Boomers are liberal and Zoomers are not exactly.”
“They are more conservative than their age predicts they ought to be,” Lehman said of the younger generation. “And so there’s a larger fraction of Zoomers who are conservative than you would expect.”
While many of the “No Kings” protests occurred without substantial incident, some were marked by disturbing threats of violence.
Most notably, the day started with the assassination of Democratic Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman, who formerly served as speaker of the Minnesota House, and her husband, allegedly by Vance Boelter, who reportedly had “No Kings” flyers in his car.
Boelter also allegedly shot Democratic Minnesota state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, both of whom survived.
Police in Austin, Texas, evacuated the Texas Capitol over “credible threats” toward lawmakers who were planning to attend the protest scheduled there.
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