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By the Way, Did You Notice Something About Florida's 'No Kings' Protests Last Weekend?

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  June 20, 2025 12:01 PM

One week ago tomorrow, leftists gathered across the country for so-called 'No Kings' protests against President Trump.  Some of them descended into chaos, unrest, and even death.  But those were the awful exceptions to what generally played out as peaceful marches in hundreds of cities and communities.  I found the whole messaging and branding to be bizarre and ineffective because Donald Trump is not a king.  He is a duly elected president who is taking actions the protesters don't like.  He is constrained by the constitution, the courts, the legislature, public opinion, and other factors.  In short, not a king.  

His response to a question about whether he feels like a monarch was funny and good:


Conservatives have also been roasting the marches on social media:


Ridicule and mocking humor is a healthy political impulse.  So, frankly, is peaceful protest.  My attitude about the 'No Kings' rallies is summed up here:


Protests are not substitutes for elections. Hundreds of thousands, or maybe millions, of lefties turned out on Saturday. More than 77 million American citizens voted Trump into office in November. The dissenters would be wise to remember that they hardly speak 'for the people,' certainly not all of them. Regardless, political movements need pressure valves to blow off steam. Gathering with placards and chants, then going home, is how it's done. It's free speech and expression. Even when I disagree with it, or think it's ridiculous, overwrought, or misguided, I can admire it as American freedom in action. What I don't respect or admire is violent protest and lawlessness, of which we have seen far too much from the Left.  Some of Saturday's marches were marred by violence, but none of that lawlessness -- zero -- took place in one particular state:

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Free speech plus law and order, for the win.  Again, this is how it's done.  And it starts from the top.  Gov. DeSantis has made clear that free speech is a sacred right in the state of Florida, but law-breaking will not be tolerated.  So we saw lots of free speech against Trump over the weekend (kings haven't historically allowed such things to happen, by the way), and no related law-breaking.  Bravo.  Another element of a thriving free speech culture is responding to bad speech, like this:


This is a grotesque and profoundly ignorant thing for anyone to say, especially a sitting member of Congress -- especially from a political party that has recently rediscovered its cynical and selective 'heated rhetoric causes violence' silencing tactic (which they never apply to their own side's rhetoric or actual violence).  If they're going to try to link comments like this to horrific violence like this, then they must blame themselves for the assassination attempts against President Trump.  They won't, because they don't actually believe any of it.  It's a bullying tool that's deployed exclusively against the other side, for their own side's perceived political gain.  It's really gross.  Speaking of, I'll leave you with Democrats sending the wrong messenger to criticize the US Army's 250th anniversary parade, which ended up being so pleasantly patriotic and stirring that even MSNBC couldn't find anything "malevolent" to nitpick:


Pro tip: If you spent your entire political career lying about serving in a war, until you got caught, keep every single one of your military-related thoughts to yourself. Forever. You'd think fellow Democrats might tell Blumenthal to take a seat. In reality, they inexplicably and shamelessly awarded him a seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.