Protesters hoisted cardboard signs against a mythical dictator, completely blind to the vast bureaucratic machine that regulates their daily lives.
Across American cities on Sunday, the streets were clogged with placard-holding puritans of the institutional left. They marched under the banner of “No Kings,” shrieking into the cyclical political winds, brandishing their cardboard slogans against the bad Orange Man, utterly blind to the chains they already wear.
Those who know the least shout the loudest.
There exists a mental defect where the least capable burden themselves with an illusion of moral superiority. In the minds of these ignoramuses, they are storming the Bastille, yet they beg the warden for a heavier lock.
This is the historical illiteracy of the modern progressive, one who demands freedom from a fever dream of a monarch, blissfully unaware that subjects of historical empires enjoyed more of the fruits of their own labor than modern democratic taxpayers do.
American history books deplore the Hessian soldiers as ruthless mercenaries. Yet, a paradox emerges when one studies the Holy Roman Empire.
The Duchies and Landgraviates that provided these auxiliary forces to the British Army were remarkably low-tax environments. They were, by many standards, freer than the constituent components of the British Empire. The soldiers were paid handsomely, and their sovereigns used the foreign rent to offset domestic taxation.
Consider. A monarch owns his realm and protects his capital. He is not a spendthrift with other people’s money because the money and the land are his own.
The king plants trees so his grandson might sit in the shade. Conversely, elected bureaucrats treat the national treasury like a stolen wallet. They drain the nation’s lifeblood to buy votes, possessing no long-term vision, no skin in the game, and no permanent connection to the soil.
The “No Kings” brigade cannot see the forest through the trees. They protest the concept of a sovereign while eagerly propping up the exact political machines and public health despots who locked them in their homes six years ago.
The modern leftist has not abolished the monarchy, nor will it, for the concept is a historical relic. Yet, their objectives were long ago accomplished by replacing the single, accountable king of history with tens of thousands of faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats.
“Fifteen days to stop the spread” morphed into years of societal destruction. Governors became absolute dictators overnight. They shuttered churches. They bankrupted small businesses. They muzzled children.
Now, those same masked zealots who policed their neighbors for walking on the beach or shooting hoops in an empty park now possess the audacity to lecture the nation on the dangers of a strongman.
Reflect. The useful idiots of the 1930s praised Stalin’s socialist utopia while millions starved. Similarly, today’s progressive foot soldiers cheer for the administrative state that crushes their neighbors.
The patriot, however, looks at the current landscape and sees the managed decline of a once-great civilization, where the heartland’s wealth is perpetually siphoned off to fund the globalist gambits of the elites.
The regime sends endless billions to secure the borders of foreign nations while the nation’s southern frontier is left wide open to the invading hordes. It is a calculated betrayal.
They build impenetrable walls around their Vineyard estates yet demand the towns in Texas absorb the chaos of an open frontier.
The self-styled elites despise the working-class families who have built, grown, and maintained what’s left of this country. They use the machinery of the modern state to enrich the well-connected while devastating the forgotten Americans.
Jack Callahan, the voice of the forgotten rabble, watched the same type of people destroy the West Coast timber towns in the name of progress. He realized then that the progressive agenda was never about conservation.
Similarly, today’s protests are never about democracy. It always comes down to stripping power from the middle class.
Regarding this psychological prison, Jack notes: “They love to talk about ‘Our democracy.’ But what is that really? Their version of democracy manifests when they suddenly discover their perceived agency and then think they now ‘rule themselves.’ Guess what? That’s the precise time they become those wonderfully submissive slaves to the regime they love to hate.”
Callahan’s observation pierces the veil. The illusion of agency is the greatest trick “Democracy” ever pulled. It convinced the populace that casting a ballot equates to true freedom, even as the regulatory state dictates every aspect of daily life. The common family is thus bled dry by a thousand tiny cuts, inflicted by distant bureaucrats.
This conflict transcends partisan bickering. The left wields whatever power it can muster to maintain the bureaucracy, demanding total obedience, couching it in terms of “your civic duty.” Their vision is a population of compliant serfs who will loudly defend their own subjugation.
The threat does not come from a hypothetical king but from the unelected administrative state and the media elites who detest traditional America.
Nobody took part in a revolution. The protesters were the foot soldiers of the establishment, fighting to protect the system that exploits them.
They are prisoners of political correctness, marching to the beat of a drum banged by their intellectual betters.
Forgotten Americans are already keenly aware of this colossal fraud and are now finished playing by the rules that long kept them in the shackles of bureaucratic serfdom.
© 2026 by Brian D. O’Leary. All rights reserved.