‘No Kings’ (Except Ours)

American Thinker 

As the curtain closes on Act Three of the performative “No Kings” protests, let’s use the intermission to ask the central question: is President Donald Trump some sort of modern king, as claimed by the marching malcontents?

But what exactly do they mean by “king”?

Under normal circumstances, the idea of “kingship” is in the conceptual neighborhood of tyranny, despotism, and autocracy. But oddly enough, President Trump’s actions have been distinctly anti-despotic.

After all, what powermonger would downsize the federal footprint?

What’s more, in driving tax cuts and child tax credits, the President is changing the economic calculus in favor of greater self-determinism -- a concept antithetical to central planning.

By reducing reliance on foreign manufacturing, President Trump is both unraveling the blackmail power that semi-hostile nations have over the American people and simultaneously creating homeland jobs through repatriation. If the President were a despotic “king,” he would work overtime to centralize production into the federal apparatus, not release it into the American free market.

Autocratic political systems, such as the 1930s German National Socialists and the communists of the Soviet Union, usurped the private sector by direct take-over or by tools like hyper-regulation. In direct opposition to this hallmark of autocracy, President Trump revoked the EPA’s Endangerment Finding, a program entangled in a web of “climate change” regulations that cost taxpayers an estimated $350 billion per year.

The leftist regimes in modern-day China and North Korea, like the Soviet communists and socialist Fascists before them, are highly opposed to Christianity and often let loose programs of persecution against the faithful. Both Presidents Biden and Obama made their disdain of Christians manifest by policy and coercion.

Once again President Trump stands in contrariety with his massive undertaking to protect religious liberty, including the formation of The Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias.

It’s easy to see that the claims about Trump’s supposed autocratic attributes crumble faster than an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez answer to a foreign policy question.

Since the spittle-laced epithets from liberal lips don’t fit a reasonable definition of “kingship,” a closer look at what they really want from their government should help us understand what all the fuss is about.

Virginia: The Liberal BLUEprint for America

The ballyhooed actions and policies of the newly-minted governor of Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, provide distinct insights into the question at-hand.

Spanberger wasted little time doffing her “moderate” campaign mask and, along with Democrat lawmakers, has blitzed Virginia with a full-throttle return to the Obama/Biden program of collectivism-friendly policies.

By mid-March, no less than 25 gun-control measures were passed, including a ban on AR-platform rifles and magazines with a capacity over 15 rounds, along with a so-called “red flag” law that ostensibly creates a fiefdom of gunphobes influencing whoever should and shouldn’t be allowed to have a firearm.

Recent human history is arrayed with patterns of aspiring autocrats disarming their citizenry. Chavez and Maduro did it. The National Socialists in 1930s Germany did it. Castro, the Khmer Rouge, the Bolsheviks, were all highly effective “gun control” advocates.

But apparently Democrats are immune to this sordid history, so let’s move on to cultural Marxism.

With Spanberger and her signet ring at the helm, Virginia democrats passed a bill that directs agencies to use race-based discrimination for discretionary government contracts.

The theme of sculpting societal order by diktat also found purchase in Spanberger’s executive order on education. Executive Order 4 gushes with intersectional dog whistles and collectivist programs, like commissioning a “listening tour” to hear from educators, leaders, students, and parents, basically amounting to taxpayer-funded grievance junkets.

With the stroke of her pen, the Virginia governor barred the purging of voter rolls in the weeks leading up to elections; a move that lines up well with the spirit of “elections” in Russia and Venezuela. Unsurprisingly, the corporate media hailed the action in their signature Orwellian dialect as “strengthening election integrity.”

Spanberger also rescinded her predecessor’s mandate for state and local law enforcement support of ICE efforts to apprehend illegal immigrants with criminal records.

Not done with ICE and sensing the opportunity to cement a California-like legislative supermajority, emboldened Virginia Democrats passed a bill that restricts federal immigration enforcement near polling places. The Bill’s sponsor, Saddam Salin (D-Fairfax), triumphantly declared that “Virginia is choosing the rule of law over fear, transparency over secrecy.”  Really, Saddam, you call that “transparency”?

It doesn’t take a Rhodes scholar to recognize that the bill is a red carpet for illegal immigrants to vote for Democrats. But strangely, the “No Kings” crowd doesn’t seem to recognize that election fraud is catnip for autocrats.

On the economic front, Spanberger and her Democrat lawmakers are quickly enacting a bacchanal of taxation that includes raising the marginal income tax rate on portfolio and passive income, sales tax hikes on delivery services, increased taxation on dry cleaning, home repairs, landscaping, animal care, and other formerly exempt services, in addition to a de facto carbon tax via the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

Taxation, of course, isn’t simply privation of personal earnings. Said economist F.A. Hayek, “Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life… it is the control of the means for all our ends.” This, of course, is not a surprise to the governor of Virginia.

In sum, Spanberger’s scorched earth leftism is the zeitgeist of 21st century American liberalism and a window into the Democrat blueprint for America.

The placard-carrying and whistle-blowing protesters are far from being concerned about the supposed dawn of a Trumpian autocracy under the punchline “No Kings” -- it’s merely Orwellian displacement for how they want us all to be governed -- they want their king. Not a King George, per se, but a ruling coalition of little King George apparatchiks to bring about their Utopian society.

Clearly, the royal shoe of autocratic “kingship” fits the leftist foot.

And therein lies the answer to our question: if the naked collectivism of Spanberger, Newsom, Walz, and Pritzker is “democracy,” then perhaps the protestors are right -- President Trump is indeed a “king” -- a monarch of liberty and champion of the American way of life.