50501 — “50 protests. 50 states. 1 movement.” — is a decentralized protest network formed in January 2025 to organize simultaneous demonstrations across every state against actions of the second Trump administration.
Origin
The idea came from a Reddit post in late January 2025, by a user posting as Evolved_Fungi, calling for a protest in each state on a single day. It spread across other platforms from there.
The first nationwide day of action was February 5, 2025; organizers estimated close to 80 protests across 88 cities, with thousands of participants in total. NPR notes that this was well short of the turnout on January 21, 2017. A second round followed on Presidents Day, February 17. Stated demands at the February protests included the removal of Elon Musk from his role leading the Department of Government Efficiency, an investigation into appointees connected to Project 2025, and the reinstatement of diversity, equity and inclusion programs rescinded by executive order.
Structure
The network is volunteer-run and has no formal legal structure — no 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) — and local groups organize autonomously under shared branding. It coordinates with Political Revolution, a group founded in 2016 after Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, and states that it is not affiliated with any political party. In February 2025 its Reddit community had more than 102,000 members and its Discord server about 7,000.
Scale
The largest day associated with the network was the “No Kings” mobilization of June 14, 2025. The Crowd Counting Consortium — a Harvard Kennedy School and University of Connecticut project that compiles publicly reported protest events — estimates between 2 and 4.8 million participants across more than 2,150 actions that day, which its researchers describe as probably the second-largest single day of demonstration since January 2017.
That range is wide for a reason, and the researchers say so: crowd figures could not be confirmed at 18% of events, almost all of them in small towns. It is an estimate with stated uncertainty, not a count, and it is reported here as one.
A note on scope
An earlier version of this page listed further 2025 mobilizations — March 4, an April 5 “Hands Off” day, May Day, and others — without sources. Those are not carried forward here, because no source cited on this page establishes them and because several were organized by broader coalitions rather than by this network. Attributing a coalition day of action to a single group misstates who organized it.
Sources
- 01.
Duster, C. (2025). Protests are set to take place on Presidents Day. Here's why. NPR. Published February 16, 2025. Source for the movement's name, its origin in a late-January Reddit post by a user posting as Evolved_Fungi, the February 5 and February 17 protests, the stated demands, the coordination with Political Revolution, and the Reddit and Discord membership figures. NPR corrected this story on February 16, 2025, having first reported the Discord group at more than 600,000 members; the corrected figure is 7,000, and the corrected figure is the one used here.
- 02.
Chenoweth, E., Hammam, S., Pressman, J., & Shay, C. W. (2025). New data shows No Kings was one of the largest days of protest in US history. Waging Nonviolence. Published August 12, 2025 by the researchers who run the Crowd Counting Consortium. Source for the June 14, 2025 estimate of 2 to 4.8 million participants across more than 2,150 actions, and for the stated limitation that crowd figures could not be confirmed at 18% of events, almost all in small towns.
- 03.
Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center and University of Connecticut. Crowd Counting Consortium. The underlying event-level protest dataset, published monthly on the Harvard Dataverse, from which the No Kings estimates are drawn. Cited so the figures above can be checked at source. dataverse.harvard.edu returns HTTP 202 with an empty body to automated clients, so the capture is recorded — but the capture is the collection's landing page with JavaScript disabled: it confirms the collection exists under this identifier and is titled "Crowd Counting Consortium U.S. Protest Event Data", and it does **not** carry the data files themselves. Checking the figures at source requires a browser.