There's Nothing More American Than 'No Kings'

Trump et al are falsely accusing 'No Kings' protesters of 'hating America,' but they are supporting the most American thing imaginable: NO KINGS.

Donald Trump and his Republican Party are recreating the charges against King George III, which highlights just how American the ‘No Kings’ movement is.

The grievances that led to the Revolutionary War included 27 specific charges, centered on five principal charges: Abuse of power, obstruction of justice, promulgation of corruption, undue intrusion of the military into civil affairs, and incitement of violence.

A pause while that digests, as the copying is stunning.

King George III is what Trump evinces every day: The mad king. The one who lost America.

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King George III reportedly suffered from recurrent bouts of mental illness, including what contemporary physicians called “madness.” Contemporary accounts described his illness as involving periods of acute mania, characterized by constant, foul-languaged speech, uncontrollable rages, and sometimes convulsions.

“He would talk constantly – his speech peppered with foul language and his mouth foaming – or fly into mercurial rages,” Discover Britain wrote, reminiscent of the ketchup incidents with which we have become familiar.

He also suffered from periods of severe anxiety, pain, and other physical ailments, including swelling of the legs and feet. His symptoms included manic speech, which a 2013 BBC analysis suggested pointed strongly to bipolar disorder in his final years. They note that he repeated himself often. An NIH analysis mentions dementia:

This is what Republicans seek to regress to, and they have found the perfect person to do it, as Trump shares many of King George III’s traits, although he lacks many of Mad King George’s good traits.

Conservatives are attempting to undo the Revolutionary War, attacking liberty in favor of authoritarianism and unchecked power.

This is no accident, as conservatives are attacking democracy in order to regress to a King, but this time a King CEO scenario — a monarchy in the form of a unitary chief executive. Techno-fascism that is not reliant upon the people’s consent.

The architect of this current moment, Curtis Yarvin, champions Trump as an American “monarch.” The New Yorker titled their June interview long-form piece on him, “Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America: The reactionary blogger’s call for a monarch to rule the country once seemed like a joke. Now the right is ready to bend the knee.”

Back in 2011, Yarvin said that Trump was one of two figures who seemed “biologically suited” to be an American monarch…In 2022, he recommended that Trump, if reelected, appoint Elon Musk to run the executive branch. On a podcast with his friend Michael Anton, now the director of policy planning at the State Department, Yarvin argued that the institutions of civil society, such as Harvard, would need to be shut down. “The idea that you’re going to be a Caesar . . . with someone else’s Department of Reality in operation is just manifestly absurd,” he said.

Yarvis has long been secretly influencing the tech bros, but now it’s out in the open. “For years, Yarvin was best known, to the extent that he was known at all, as the court philosopher of the Thiel-verse, the network of heterodox entrepreneurs, intellectuals, and hangers-on surrounding the tech mogul.” However, a “decade on, with the Trumpian right embracing strongman rule, Yarvin’s links to elites in Silicon Valley and Washington are no longer a secret.”

This entire piece by Ava Kofman in the New Yorker is deeply disturbing, but there is a silver lining that speaks to the No Kings movement and therefore, this Saturday, and it can be found in Yarvis’s concern that Trump has not gone far enough.

“He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave.”

As his ideas have been surrealized in doge and Trump has taken to self-identifying as a king, one might expect to find Yarvin in an exultant mood. In fact, he has spent the past few months fretting that the moment will go to waste. “If you have a Trump boner right now, enjoy it,” he wrote two days after the election. “It’s as hard as you’ll ever get.” What many see as the most dangerous assault on American democracy in the nation’s history Yarvin dismisses as woefully insufficient—a “vibes coup.” Without a full-blown autocratic takeover, he believes, a backlash is sure to follow. When I spoke to him recently, he quoted the words of Louis de Saint-Just, the French philosopher who championed the Reign of Terror: “He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave.”

Notably, Yarvis has designed the destruction of liberty and freedom for something he doesn’t understand at all. He is utterly clueless about what it really means.

He “has never visited let alone lived under various dictatorships but has high praise for how he imagines they function (which is naturally very different from how they actually function).”

It goes deeply into stunning stupidity to idealize something you’ve never experienced while ignoring that the people who have experienced it have condemned and fought against it throughout history.