Late first post again today, for a very good reason: I’ve been researching and pondering what to write about the sad, pathetic, useless (well, maybe not useless, as I will elaborate on later) “No Kings” protests today. It even took me a long time to settled on the most direct and simplest of the myriad hilarious memes on the topic, as you can see above. (Powerline has a bumper crop in its weekly conservative meme collection, here.)

I was originally going to feature a depressing photo posted on Facebook this morning by two of my favorite people, both retired lawyers, both learned, accomplished and intelligent, and catastrophically Trump Deranged. It shows them smiling in a gathering mob of D.C. “No Kings” protesters, as they hold one of the vague protest signs printed up with George Soros’s money. Sure, I was going to blur out their faces, but I don’t want them to take my criticism (or diagnosis) personally. It’s not their fault that they have lost their frickin’ minds. They live in a bubble, they have always been Democrats, they subscribe to the Washington Post, but they had no way of predicting that their powers of critical thinking could ever be so eroded by hate, bias, and misinformation.

That meme above is unadorned but correct. This nationwide protest is little more than a tantrum, a primal scream from the increasingly radical and deluded Left, orchestrated by the Axis of Unethical Conduct.

Powerline says in its introduction to today’s meme-fest, “’No Kings’ is an odd theme for a protest, isn’t it? Notably absent is any reference to any policy issue. The “No Kings” theme reflects the fact that the Democrats are utterly out of ammo when it comes to policy, and have nothing left but hatred of President Trump.” Lots of wags have pointed out that a king would never permit a “No Kings” protest, but what I find nauseating is the hypocrisy. These are the same people who tolerated a prop President who was presented to the America people as a fully-engaged leader by a conspiracy, a cover-up. They then voted for the least democratically-chosen Presidential candidate since George Washington, whose chosen running mate advocated the punishment of speech that Democrats find offensive or inconvenient. Today we learned that Democratic funders—my two friends in that photo may well be among them— are rushing to the rescue of Jay Jones, the Democratic candidate for Virginia Attorney General, who was revealed to have advocated the violent murder of his political opponents and the death of their young children.

Now that’s evil king stuff: “MacBeth,” King Henry the Eighth, Richard the Third.

Meanwhile, the timing of the crazy protest couldn’t be worse. The government shutdown is entirely caused by the party out of power, as Democrats fume about subsidies to their unaffordable Affordable Care Act being cancelled, lie about whether those subsidies will assist illegal immigrants (they will), and the crucial nature of their demands (like restoring taxpayer funding for progressive propaganda arms NPR and PBS. More ridiculous still, many of today’s protesters are the same people who demanded that the “genocide” in Gaza stop. Trump stopped it just last week, but never mind, they hate him anyway. Another Powerline shot…

Never before has partisan hatred of an elected President produced such widespread desire for his administration to fail even when its objectives are objectively desirable. Remember, Bill Maher, now backtracking because he is an opportunistic weasel, said during Trump’s first term on his HBO show that it would be “worth it” for the economy to crash to get rid of Trump. (And then the Democratic Party allies the teachers unions and the Deep State-stuffed CDC crashed the economy with their Wuhan panic lockdown.)

If you ask the “No Kings” suckers what they are specifically upset about, the answers generally make no sense. The policies they deplore, like enforcing the immigration laws, are favored by the majority of the public. On Bluesky, the all-progressive “X” alternative (because its users don’t want debate, they want affirmation of their biases), the White House yesterday joined up to troll the platform’s Trump Derangement sufferers. Prominent in the “Oh yeah? What about…” responses were allusions to the imaginary Jeffrey Epstein “cover-up.” As I said: pathetic.

In more specific terms, substacker Rod Martin made a cogent case about what this protest is really about, at least to the minority of demonstrators who are informed rather than just caught up in their friends’ hate. He writes at the start of his excellent essay,

As I’ve chronicled unendingly here at The Rod Martin Report and in my recent Essays on the Counterrevolution, America has suffered unconstitutional one-party rule for nearly a century. FDR created the modern administrative state — allegedly “independent” agencies with legislative, executive, and judicial power fused, unaccountable to and unfireable by the elected President. He did so knowing that the millions of bureaucrats he hired would all do his bidding, but after he was gone, they would continue to do his bidding, regardless of the outcome of any election. And part of that bidding would be hiring their own, handpicked successors.

Ever wonder why no matter who wins the White House most things never change? That’s why. There’s one President. He gets to appoint less than 5,000 people, many of whom are ambassadors and others with few policy-making powers. But together, they’re supposed to manage nearly 3 million bureaucrats they cannot fire and who don’t actually have to answer to any of them.

The Democrats say they don’t want kings. Perhaps. But they absolutely want that de facto aristocracy: allegedly impartial technocrats who rule us “for our own good,” since we “can’t trust” elected officials to be experts, or incorruptible.

Of course, the assumption in all of that is that bureaucrats ARE experts and ARE incorruptible. But they aren’t. They cannot be. And even ignoring their sin natures and their general susceptibility to corruption, they are partisans. Yet you have no say over them. And if their so-called “expertise” leads us off a cliff, you cannot — not even through winning a national election — change their course.

That’s unconstitutional. It’s anti-American. It’s one-party rule. It’s certainly not freedom. And it wouldn’t be even if all of them were always experts, and were always “neutral”. Citizens have the right to be wrong, and bureaucrats should not have the right to a final say, much less a veto, over the electorate’s choices. Should the voters not have the right to peacefully overthrow their government every two to four years?…First, when real change is actually possible through the outcome of an election, people take elections more seriously. Debate ensues. Turnout increases. Citizenship matters.

But even more than that, if the American people vote for a policy platform in the person of a President, they should get what they voted for. We have two houses of Congress and a judiciary to keep all that inside the lines. Article II doesn’t set up a king, but it does set up a President. He is one of three branches, which check and balance one another. But if he is constantly held in check not by Constitutional branches but by unelected employees, elections really don’t matter, and two of three branches are beyond the voters’ say.

Yup. They are mad because democracy works eventually: you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. That’s no way to build a socialist paradise! Trump and the Supreme Court that he fortunately was able to refashion are determined to return control of the Executive Branch to the Executive, just as the Constitution envisioned it. What a radical concept! And being the President that the Founders envisioned as they explicitly rejected a monarchy makes Donald Trump a “king.”

Got it. I don’t know how today’s protesters will be able to look at themselves in the mirror without blushing after this.

Addendum: I nearly forgot to explain why this fiasco isn’t useless. It isn’t useless for two reasons: 1. It exposes just how desperate and without real substance the protests of the Axis and its brainwashed victims are. They have nothing. Literally. This morning one of my once astute Facebook friends, a Harvard grad, was moaning about how Trump pardoning George Santos proves he’s a king. George Santos! The pardon power is 100% Presidential, legal and traditional: EVERY President who pardons anyone is acting like a king. (Biden, or his autopen, pardoned his criminal son.) Santos is a petty crook, but he’s not a threat to society, like say, the killers, rapists and drug dealers my friend’s party let into the United States over the previous four years. Ooo! Ooo! Trump is a king because he’s using law enforcement to get them out of the country! 2. The organized tantrum today is better than them shooting people with those guns they want banned. “No Kings” is a safety valve for the Deranged. I sure hope it works.

PS: What do you think, is Curmie protesting?