They came with baby strollers and walkers—young and old, rich and poor, entrepreneurs and socialists, the quiet and the outspoken. But they came. In more than 2,500 cities and towns—some gatherings as small as five, others as large as 300,000. And they rallied around a concept as American as apple pie: that we are a nation of laws, not of kings. They came to protest a government that continues to trample fundamental rights while attempting to rule by executive fiat.

G. Elliott Morris, a data journalist formerly associated with FiveThirtyEight who now publishes the “Strength in Numbers” Substack, places total participation, based on numbers gathered by independent Atlanta-based science newsroom The Xylem and the Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC), a joint project of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the University of Connecticut, at between 5 and 7 million, perhaps the largest mass protest in since 1970. People can quibble with the actual number, but, in some ways, it doesn’t matter. The day’s importance lies in the growing participation in these events (Oct 18 numbers greatly exceeded the first “No Kings” protests of last June) and shows that dissent is large and exists in all parts of this nation.