How manufactured outrage replaced real resistance.
You showed up on Saturday. You held a sign. You felt the energy of thousands of people around you, and for a moment it felt like something real, something democratic, something urgent, something yours. The rallies felt electric. The chants echoed off downtown buildings, and for a moment, everyone believed they were part of something authentic, the will of the people rising up in real time. Yet the truth behind the scene was quieter, colder, and infinitely more organized.
But here’s a question worth sitting with: where did that sign come from?
The posters weren’t hand-drawn. They were pre-printed, bundled, and shipped to distribution points across the country well before the rallying cry went viral. Researchers tracking the organizational footprint of the protests identified hundreds of distinct groups involved in coordinating turnout, messaging, and logistics. Those signs, they were printed before you decided to show up. In fact, it was printed before most people knew there was anything to show up for. Those glossy placards weren’t scrawled in parking lots with Sharpies. They were mass-produced, shipped in advance, and by the time you decided you were angry, someone else had already printed your outrage for you.
That is not a movement. That is a machine.
Beneath the Surface of “Spontaneity”
The “No Kings” protests that swept across the country in early 2025 were framed in every major outlet as a spontaneous, grassroots response to executive overreach. In theory, a grassroots movement is supposed to bubble up from ordinary citizens. In practice, the “No Kings” moment arose from an intricate web of nonprofits, political action groups, and media partners. In fact, more than 500 organizations with a combined revenue estimated in the billions funded your voice.
That’s not spontaneity; it’s choreography.
Real uprisings don’t move in single-phrase slogans. They’re messy, divided, and unpredictable. But what happened here was synchronized. The message was standardized. The outrage had been packaged before anyone hit the streets. You were walking into capitalistic infrastructure, not revolution.
Compare this to the genuine grassroots eruptions of the past, the early Tea Party rallies in 2009 and 2010, which were notably disorganized, inconsistent in messaging, and largely self-funded by people who had never organized anything in their lives. Grassroots movements are messy. They contradict themselves. They show up with misspelled signs and competing agendas.
What Tyranny Isn’t
The slogans warned that tyranny had arrived. But look carefully at your surroundings. Tyranny is when a critic disappears for a tweet, when opposition newspapers shut down overnight, and when the wrong joke lands you in a cell. None of that is happening here. The word “king” was chosen carefully. It bypasses analysis and goes straight to emotion, to every middle school history lesson about the American Revolution, to every story about arbitrary power and divine right and unaccountable rule.
The United States operates under a constitutional republic with three co-equal branches of government, each designed with mechanisms to check the others. The executive branch enforces law but cannot write it unilaterally without consequence. The judiciary reviews executive action and has done so repeatedly in recent years, with courts at every level issuing injunctions against policies from both Republican and Democratic administrations. The legislative branch holds the power of the purse and can override the executive with sufficient votes.
Elections happen on fixed schedules. Presidential terms are capped at two by the 22nd Amendment. The sitting president does not appoint his own successor. Well, except if you’re Joe Biden. The press, every major outlet, cable network, and social media platform, spent years running wall-to-wall coverage characterizing the sitting president as a fascist, a dictator, and an existential threat to democracy. Those journalists still have jobs. Those outlets are still broadcasting. No one has been arrested for calling the president a fascist.
That is not tyranny. Tyranny does not allow you to rehearse chants against it in a public park.
Real tyranny looks like what happened to Alexei Navalny, poisoned, imprisoned, and killed. It looks like what happened to journalists in China, in Iran, in Venezuela: disappeared, silenced, or made into examples. It looks like the Gulag. It looks like the Cultural Revolution.
It does not look like a country where the opposition party holds a third of federal power, where courts routinely rule against the president, and where dissent is not merely tolerated but professionally rewarded.
That’s is not oppression; it is performance.
Longevity Is the Real Power
If you want to see where authority actually lodges itself, look not at who gets shouted down online, look at who never leaves. Decade after decade, the same names keep surfacing, even as administrations change.
Consider a short list of career fixtures in federal power:
- Steny Hoyer: forty-plus years of uninterrupted service.
- Maxine Waters: more than three decades of incumbency.
- Chuck Schumer: entered Congress before most of today’s college activists were born.
- Nancy Pelosi: seated in 1987, shaping leadership roles for nearly four decades.
- Mitch McConnell: in office since the 1980s, wielding influence through both majority and minority status.
- Bernie Sanders: first elected to Congress when Reagan was president.
- Pat Leahy and Dianne Feinstein (before her death in 2023) each served over half a lifetime in the Senate.
- Lindsey Graham and Richard Durbin — both fixtures since the Clinton years.
These comparisons are not meant to equate American politicians with historical dictators in terms of conduct. They are meant to illustrate a simple point: entrenched, decades-long institutional power is the definition of an established ruling class. Measured against world history, many of these tenures outlasted entire monarchies. The rhetoric warns about kings, but entrenched political classes are dynasties by another name, just elected at reliable intervals.
If you are worried about the concentration of power, the question worth asking is: why are you focused on the disruptor and not the system he disrupted? The outsider who enters a long-calcified political structure and creates chaos is not, historically, the same threat as the institutions that have held and shaped power for generations. One of them built the machine. The other is fighting with it.
The Queen’s Coronation Nobody Mentioned
And yet when a seismic moment of actual “crowning” took place, the silence was deafening.
When President Biden bowed out of the 2024 race, the Democratic establishment moved with astonishing speed. Within days, Vice President Kamala Harris was effectively installed as the presumptive nominee without a single primary vote being cast. There was no meaningful contest. There was no debate among competing candidates. There was no ballot through which Democratic voters could express a preference. Major donors consolidated almost overnight. Party infrastructure aligned within 72 hours. Endorsements poured in en masse before any deliberation could occur.
The people who had spent years arguing that democratic process was sacred, that every vote must count, that the will of the people must be respected, watched a candidate be crowned by party elites and institutional donors, and they cheered.
No one cried that a queen had been crowned. The same people decrying monarchy cheered the pageantry when it served their side.
The contradiction wasn’t subtle; it was televised.
The Document Problem
Just days before those marches, proposals for expanded voter ID were shouted down as “voter suppression.” The argument relied on principle. Citizens shouldn’t have to prove their status to exercise a right.
But in the very recent COVID era, Americans couldn’t attend a concert, eat indoors, or return to work without showing paperwork. Medical proof was required to exist in public spaces.
Let that land. You needed proof to eat. But proof to vote is oppression.
Yet when the documentation supported a favored policy, it wasn’t oppression, it was responsibility. Now, the same gestures are painted as tyranny.
Identity checks for employment? Acceptable.
Identity checks for voting? Impossible.
That’s not fairness; that’s convenience masquerading as morality.
For the record: virtually every functioning democracy on Earth requires some form of identification to vote. Canada requires ID. Germany requires ID. France requires ID. Mexico, a country frequently cited by American progressives as having greater economic inequality, requires a national voter ID card that the government provides for free. The idea that identification requirements are uniquely American voter suppression has no basis in comparative democratic practice.
Invisible Arithmetic
This one requires a little more patience, because it operates below the level of daily news.
The U.S. Census is conducted every ten years. Census data determines congressional apportionment, how many House seats each state receives. More seats mean more Electoral College votes. It is, quite literally, the mathematical foundation of political representation in America.
The Census counts all residents, not just citizens. This is a long-standing practice with legitimate historical and administrative rationale, and the Supreme Court addressed the core question in Department of Commerce v. New York (2019), blocking the Trump administration’s attempt to add a citizenship question, though notably on procedural rather than constitutional grounds.
Here is the practical consequence: states with large non-citizen populations, legal permanent residents, visa holders, and undocumented immigrants, receive more congressional representation than their citizen population alone would generate. California, for example, retains more House seats than it would if apportionment were based solely on citizen population. Those seats come at the expense of states with smaller non-citizen populations, many of which trend politically conservative.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is arithmetic. The Census Bureau publishes the numbers. The apportionment formula is public. Anyone can run the math.
You don’t need a crown to accumulate power. You need a methodology.
Coordinated Speech, Soft Censorship
In July 2023, federal judge Terry Doughty issued a preliminary injunction in Missouri v. Biden, later renamed Murthy v. Missouri, blocking several federal agencies from communicating with social media platforms to suppress content. The ruling described what he found as “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.”
The case documented years of direct communication between officials at the FBI, the CDC, the Surgeon General’s office, the State Department, and the White House with executives at Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The communications were not limited to illegal content or documented misinformation. They included requests to suppress:
- The Hunter Biden laptop story, which major platforms labeled as potential “hack-and-leak” disinformation in October 2020 and suppressed in the weeks before the presidential election. The laptop’s contents were later verified as authentic by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other outlets that had initially dismissed or ignored the story.
- Discussion of COVID-19’s potential origins, including the lab leak hypothesis, which was flagged as dangerous speculation by government officials and suppressed on multiple platforms. By 2023, the FBI, Department of Energy, and CIA had all assessed lab origin as at least plausible, with the FBI assigning it moderate-to-high confidence.
- Posts questioning the efficacy of masks and vaccine mandates, including posts by licensed physicians sharing peer-reviewed research that contradicted official guidance.
- Satire and parody, yes, humor. Accounts making jokes about public health messaging were flagged as potential vectors of vaccine hesitancy.
The Supreme Court ultimately ruled in Murthy v. Missouri (2024) that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue, which meant the merits were not directly adjudicated. But the underlying documentary record, the emails, the Slack messages, the internal communications, is real, public, and detailed.
Government officials pressuring private corporations to suppress speech is a form of censorship that doesn’t require a state-run media apparatus. It requires a phone call and a LinkedIn connection. And what administration was behind most of it? Not the alleged “King” in power.
Parent or State?
Across the country, beginning roughly in 2019 and accelerating through 2022 and 2023, public school systems in dozens of states implemented policies permitting, and in some cases requiring, school staff to affirm a student’s expressed gender identity without notifying parents. Some policies explicitly prohibited staff from informing parents if a child had begun socially transitioning at school.
The legal battles over these policies have been fierce and ongoing. Organizations like the ACLU have argued that parental notification requirements violate student privacy. Parental rights groups have argued that school systems are making consequential decisions about children’s psychological and developmental welfare while deliberately excluding the people legally responsible for those children.
Whatever your position on the underlying policy, the dynamic is worth naming: an institution substituting its judgment for a parent’s in matters that directly affect a child’s health and development, and doing so without transparency or consent, is a structural assertion of state authority over family.
That is not a conservative talking point. That is a description of what the policies literally do.
Historically, every system that has sought to expand state control over population has eventually targeted the family as a competing source of loyalty and authority. You don’t have to believe we’re living in that system to notice when a policy fits the pattern.
History offers countless examples of where that trajectory ends, and none of them look like liberation.
Double Standards Everywhere
In the summer of 2020, protests, riots, and unrest spread to cities across the United States following the death of George Floyd. The scale of the violence was documented extensively: an estimated $1–2 billion in property damage, more than 700 law enforcement officers injured in the first weeks, at least 19 deaths during the unrest in the first two weeks alone.
Many of those events were described by major media outlets and elected officials as “mostly peaceful” even as fires burned in the background of live broadcasts. In Portland, Oregon, federal buildings were attacked nightly for months. In Minneapolis, a police precinct was abandoned and burned. In Seattle, a multi-block area was seized by protesters who declared it an “autonomous zone” for several weeks.
The official response from many Democratic mayors and governors was to restrict police response, reduce law enforcement budgets, and in some cases decline to prosecute individuals arrested during the unrest.
At the same time, in March 2020, those same cities and states were enforcing emergency orders that: closed churches (an action challenged in the Supreme Court in Tandon v. Newsom and South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom), prohibited families from gathering in private homes, shut down small businesses while allowing large retailers to remain open, and in several cases prevented family members from being present with dying relatives in hospitals.
A small business owner who violated a capacity restriction faced fines and potential closure. An organized group that burned a building faced, in many jurisdictions, charges that were later dropped.
One standard for one kind of activity. A completely different standard for another.
When law is applied selectively based on political content, that is not a functioning legal system. That is power deciding what counts, which is, if we’re using the vocabulary of the protest, exactly what kings do.
Selective punishment is not justice; it’s strategy.
Laws bent for favored causes. Rules hardened against dissenters.
The Hidden Architects
Among the most visibly organized groups present at the “No Kings” demonstrations was the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), a revolutionary socialist organization that does not obscure its goals. The PSL openly advocates for the abolition of capitalism and the U.S. government as currently constituted, and has been involved in organizing protests ranging from anti-war demonstrations to prison abolition events to the 2024 and 2025 protest cycles.
The PSL had signs, marshals, branded materials, and coordinated chants. They were not attending the protest. They were, in significant measure, running logistics for it.
The PSL and several allied organizations have financial ties — direct and indirect — to networks connected to Neville Roy Singham, a tech entrepreneur and billionaire who sold his company ThoughtWorks for over $700 million and subsequently became one of the largest private funders of far-left media and organizing in the United States. Singham now operates primarily from Shanghai.
Investigative reporting by The New York Times in 2023 documented Singham’s funding networks and their connections to Chinese state media. Organizations in his funding network have published and amplified content that closely mirrors Chinese Communist Party messaging on issues including Taiwan, Hong Kong, and U.S. foreign policy. One organization in the network, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, has produced material co-published by state-linked Chinese entities.
None of this means every person who attended a “No Kings” protest is a Chinese Communist Party asset. That would be absurd. But some of them are, the signage is clear as day. It means the infrastructure of the protest , the organization, the funding, the message architecture, traces back, at least in part, to a billionaire in Shanghai with documented ties to networks that align with a government that is not neutral about American political stability.
You thought you were fighting for democracy. You may have been fighting for someone else’s interests.
So when you carried a “No Kings” sign, the operation behind you might have been far more global and more strategic than it appeared. They might have been fighting for a king or a supreme ruler. Isn’t that exactly why you march to stop that?
When Defenders Forget Their Own Principles
For decades, the American Civil Liberties Union prided itself on one radical standard: free speech means free speech for everyone. Nazis, communists, religious extremists, if they had a right under the First Amendment, the ACLU stood beside them in court. That moral consistency gave the organization credibility even among its adversaries.
In recent years, that logic has visibly eroded. The ACLU has taken positions opposing certain free speech protections, filed amicus briefs supporting platform censorship in specific contexts, and internally debated, per leaked documents, whether some forms of speech cause sufficient harm to warrant restriction. Former ACLU board member Wendy Kaminer and longtime staff attorney Ira Glasser have publicly criticized the organization’s departure from its founding mission. Internal debates and policy reversals revealed a new mood: protecting speech only when it doesn’t cause offense. But once the right to speak depends on someone else’s comfort, it’s no longer a right, it’s permission.
The Moving Goalposts
In 1995, President Bill Clinton delivered his State of the Union address and said, to a standing ovation from both parties: “All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected, but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more, by hiring a record number of new border guards.”
He also signed the 1994 Crime Bill, which expanded the federal death penalty, added 100,000 police officers to American streets, and introduced mandatory minimum sentencing provisions. He signed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. He declared in 1996 that “the era of big government is over.”
These were not fringe positions. They were the consensus of a moderate-liberal coalition that assumed borders, law enforcement, limited government, and traditional institutions were building blocks of a functional society, things you could debate the edges of, not things you dismantled.
Today, those positions would make Bill Clinton unelectable in a Democratic primary in most major cities. The distance between 1995 Clinton and 2025 Democratic orthodoxy is not a minor course correction. It is a fundamental shift in what the coalition considers acceptable to say out loud.
That shift happened gradually, through institutions, through media framing, through the systematic redefinition of normal positions as extreme ones. It didn’t require a king. It required patience, consistency, and control of the spaces where ideas are formed.
Learning to See the Pattern
If you want to spot creeping control, stop chasing labels and start spotting behaviors. The signs usually look like this:
- Punishing dissent without using explicit law.
- Rewriting rules after the fact to favor those in power.
- Allowing political violence from allies but condemning it from opponents.
- Entrenching ideology in schools, corporations, and media.
- Blurring lines between corporate moderation and government enforcement.
The answer is not comfortable, and it is not as simple as the slogan on the sign they handed you. You can march against crowns all you want, but crowns aren’t required to rule. Sometimes the power wearing no jewels is the hardest to see. A system that controls what you hear, coordinates what you think, funds what you feel, and then hands you a pre-printed sign telling you where to stand, that system does not need a crown.
It just needs you to keep showing up.
You thought you were resisting control. Maybe you were building it. When Kamala Harris became the anointed choice, no one shouted “queen.” Everyone applauded.
That should tell you everything.
Are you listening? The noise is loud and it is easy to get caught up in the crowd. Sit back, look around and take a moment to clear your head and you might realize that you are not fight for who or what you think you are. And through it all, please remember, in the midst of chaos, sparkle. Don’t let life dull your shine.
