The nascent No Kings effort is laden with absurdities and has been since its inception. It has a catchy name but like most leftist agitprop, it’s entirely vapid and seemingly merged with a gaggle of like minded progressive brands. The irony began during its June 14 debut, when No Kings misled millions of people into taking to the streets, none of whom were arrested for peacefully protesting because there was no king to order their arrest.
Aging militants denouncing kings, the oligarchy, or whatever else they’re told to denounce, seemed oblivious to the fact that foreign billionaires and domestic billionaires bankrolled the protest, or that the heir to a foreign oligarch’s billions married a long-time Hillary Clinton confidant in a tony Hamptons wedding attended by America’s wealthy elite - on the same day.
But No Kings isn’t finished. It’s planning another mobilization next month. After urging protesters to wave American flags during the June protests to show how much they love America, they're protesting for independence from kings on July 4. Makes sense. But like everything else about No Kings, the follow-up protests, including another one planned for mid-July, are senseless too.
An email from No Kings invites people to “Be a part of the next mass mobilization on July 17 with Good Trouble Lives On.” This mid-week event, which shares its name with a cancelled Disney TV series whose finale attracted some 70,000 viewers, promises more absurdities. To be fair, Good Trouble was an award winning show. It was among 107 programs to earn a prestigious ReFrame Stamp Award in its final season.
The July 17 protest urges people “to respond to the attacks posed on our civil and human rights by the Trump administration,” yet fails to note which of our rights are under attack. Whatever these threats are, they’re apparently serious. No Kings tells its congregants, “We are facing the most brazen rollback of civil rights in generations.” Which civil rights are being brazenly rolled back? Nobody knows.
The date was chosen to commemorate the death of former congressman and civil rights activist John Lewis. Lewis achieved notoriety for his dogged protests against bigoted Democrat politicians in the south who sought to deprive black Americans of their civil and human rights. Lewis also demonstrated against Democrats trying to protect the Ku Klux Klan and maintain the party’s racist Jim Crow policies. Think of it: No Kings Democrats want other Democrats to march in the streets to acknowledge a man who fought against their racist fellow Democrat Klansmen.
Everything No Kings says and does is preposterous, so it’s tempting to write them off as just another example of leftist agitation. But that would be a mistake. For all the bumper sticker slogans embraced by No Kings, it’s a force to be reckoned with. It is well funded, well organized nationally and locally, and has a firm grasp of the messaging and technology necessary to incite people to gather in large numbers. It will likely eclipse the Move On campaign that sprouted in the wake of Bill Clinton’s impeachment nearly 30 years ago, and remains active today. Move On was spawned in defense of a president’s sexual appetites and it continues to champion various sexual proclivities.
It’s too early to tell whether the No Kings event next month will get the same traction as its curtain raiser. Given the aging demographics of many attendees at the June 14 protests, it might attract some people in their dotage with nothing better to do on a Thursday aside from trying to relive the glory days of the American campus protest movement 60 years ago. For all we know, it may be that some of these elderly people inadvertently took the brown acid at Woodstock.
July 17 isn’t a make-or-break moment for the No Kings movement but it will be telling. Promoting an event using false and vaguely worded threats, built around the legacy of an actual civil rights leader who battled Democrat-imposed racism, seems a risky bet. The slender thread on which the group’s follow-up protest hangs could yield a giant flop. If it does flop, the establishment media can be counted on to provide the cover smoke organizers need to conceal their failure. But it could show how easily it can manipulate those in its target audience, and we may again see millions of belligerents disrupting the lives of ordinary Americans by clogging our streets and sidewalks.
Regardless of the results next month, it’s unwise to dismiss the No Kings campaign and the monied interests behind it. The group may be farcical but it has clout and following Socialist Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral primary win this week, it’ll grow faster still. The goal is to agitate and divide people, just as their Bolshevik and Marxist predecessors did more than a century ago. We ignore them at our peril.
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