While millions in the United states rise up to protest against authoritarian dictates most still fail to realize that the issue lies in the state itself, not in a figurehead.
“Politics is a pendulum whose swings between anarchy and tyranny are fueled by perennially rejuvenated illusions.”— Albert Einstein
We're less than a week removed from the most recent No Kings Day protests, during which millions of Americans took to the streets to express their staunch disapproval of the Trump Administration's authoritarian actions.
Amid this year's earlier No Kings protests, we highlighted many of the ways in which the same participants who purport to be opposed to authoritarian dictates tacitly supported them when it was convenient throughout previous Administrations —
"What stands out in this author's mind, having written political commentaries for nearly a decade, is the somber realization that a large portion if not a vast majority of these very same people now suddenly concerned with opposing monarchical dictates were the same ones who not only sat back and allowed many of these same abuses to be carried out in previous administrations but just as recently as a few years ago were all too willingly accepting of the draconian policies of the COVID-1984 scamdemic.
Forced isolation. Quasi martial law under lockdown mandates. Economic destruction in the form of mass business closures. Forced medical interventions of experimental injections, segregation in the form of vaccine passports, and let us not forget the talk of quarantine camps. Many of the same people who are today very rightly aghast at the Trump administration's erection of a concentration camp in the Florida Everglades dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz" would have gleefully stood by as those of us who refused to take the COVID jab were rounded up and forced into a similar facility."
These sentiments are still valid. However, as The Free Thought Project’s editor-in-chief, Matt Agorist, noted in a recent commentary, the protests amount to little more than political theater. When the purpose of a protest is to challenge power and drive real change, yet all it accomplishes is creating optics for a cause without meaningful action, it fails to build genuine solutions. —
"Governments don’t wake up and change because of your moral outrage. They move when their power is threatened. You can march all day, but you’ll still pay your taxes, obey their laws, and fund their wars. That’s not liberty—it’s managed compliance."
Journalist and political commentator Caitlin Johnstone put it even more aptly in her recent column, elaborating upon the nature of fake political revolutions in the United States —
"Millions flooded the US streets for the “No Kings” protests over the weekend to oppose a monarchy which does not exist without making a single tangible demand. Power was not challenged in any meaningful way. The status quo wasn’t disrupted in the slightest. People held up some signs saying the president is orange and that if Kamala were president they would be at brunch, and then went home.
The whole thing was just one big pep rally for the Democratic Party, designed to accomplish nothing beyond getting American liberals excited about the prospect of someday voting for Gavin Newsom. A bunch of boomers showed up to dance around and hold signs and feel as though they are fighting the power in their feely bits, while drumming up support for the same status quo which gave rise to Trump in the first place.
You see the same fake revolutionary astroturf zeitgeist on the Republican side. American rightists are constantly pretending they’re fighting some kind of populist rebellion against an oppressive establishment even while their party controls every branch of the US government. They act like Trump is ending the wars and fighting the Deep State even as he stomps out free speech on behalf of Israel, rolls out a Palantir surveillance system, pours weapons into facilitating Israel’s genocidal atrocities, bombs Iran and Yemen, ramps up for war with Venezuela, and perpetuates the horrific proxy war in Ukraine.
It’s two plutocrat-owned warmongering imperialist parties whipping their respective bases into the mass delusion that they are participating in a heroic act of revolutionary defiance by voting Democrat or Republican. They get everyone fighting a fake revolution so that nobody thinks about fighting a real one."
A poignant observation indeed.
Make no mistake: we currently have an administration at war with the American people—arguably more so than any of its predecessors. But that is precisely the point.
Beneath all its bluster and bombast, its draconianism and despotism, the Trump administration is working tirelessly to advance the same technocratic agenda championed by the rest of the political ruling class.
While some demonstrators at the No Kings protest opined for a reality in which they wouldn't need to protest had Kamala Harris instead been installed as the figurehead of the US Empire, they inadvertently demonstrated their own logical inconsistency when, for all intents and purposes, Harris serves the very same fundamental interests of the technocrats.
That is not to disregard the clear, surface-level differences between this administration and a hypothetical Harris administration. However, it remains essential to recognize that each faction of the statist establishment has its own set of policies it would prioritize—often to the detriment of one or more groups of people—tacitly supported by those who endorse their preferred version of government-sanctioned violence.
But that the government is in and of itself inherently a monopoly on violence is the crux of the matter.
People should never forget that whatever powers you grant the government will ultimately, inevitably, be wielded by the worst among them.
Let’s look at a few examples.
Imagine, if you will, that the left had succeeded during the previous administration in centralizing control—over health care and housing, to start—with the federal government.
Universal health care, subsidized by the state. Affordable housing, supported by government loans. For some on the left, this would represent great progress. Yet imagine those same centralized powers in the hands of Donald Trump. Imagine how a ruthlessly authoritarian regime such as the one we have now could abuse such powers.
Housing? Not for immigrants. With centralized government control over the housing market, all it would take is political pressure on the companies receiving subsidies to bend to the administration’s will. Want to keep operating? Then no more housing to any group the Trump administration deems “lesser than.”
Government-provided health care? Sure—but only within the parameters the tyrants deem necessary.
It shouldn’t need to be explained how a government so openly hostile to women’s bodily autonomy would inevitably abuse such power. At a time when reproductive health care—such as abortion—is already being restricted across multiple states under the yoke of radical religious fundamentalists, fully centralized government control over the medical sector would be a disaster not only for women’s rights but for any other group the extremists in charge wish to purge from society.
What about government-controlled education? State-subsidized schooling is another area where some would like to see the government exert even greater control. Public education is already riddled with lies and propaganda, and in this scenario, we need only look at how the Trump administration has waged an assault on institutions of higher learning—attempting to rewrite history to fit an approved right-wing narrative—to see how further centralization of education would ensure that only the “official” story is allowed.
None of this is to suggest that these abuses of power would be confined to the right. Those on the left side of the false dichotomy would have no qualms about wielding the same authoritarian tactics against their perceived enemies.
Hyperbolic statists always frame their agendas as morally justifiable crusades—either as “patriots” attempting to save America from radical communists, or as “virtuous revolutionaries” opposing the encroachment of fascism. What they fail to realize is that fascism and communism are not opposites on the political spectrum; they occupy the same end—both cut from the same cloth of authoritarian collectivism.
For the No Kings protesters, it’s important to realize that the powers they now protest Trump for wielding were not created in a vacuum. They emerged from decades of public apathy toward presidential indemnity and the expanding scope of executive authority with wanton disregard for the Constitution. Through executive orders and legislation such as the National Defense Authorization Act, the Patriot Act, the Freedom Act, and numerous other Orwellian laws that slipped through the cracks of Congress, the government’s control over the lives of average Americans has steadily expanded.
From Nixon’s drug war to Reagan’s covert calamities, Clinton’s crime bill, Bush’s mass surveillance, Obama’s drone programs, and beyond, the tyrannical regime we face today is the product of decades of perpetual, unchecked bipartisan corruption.
The pendulum always swings back. One must never forget that a government powerful enough to give you everything you want is also powerful enough to take it all away. The answer to our woes is not found in transferring power from one political puppet to another—it is to stop giving government power.
Real solutions don’t come from protests that amount to little more than self-righteous grandstanding. They come from genuine action: reclaiming control over our lives from the state through decentralization, coordinated efforts, mass civil disobedience, general strikes, participation in alternative economies, and the creation of parallel systems outside the status quo—much like those the exit and build strategy advocates.
True opposition to tyranny isn’t about demanding that the tyrant’s power be handed to another tyrant. It’s about taking that power away altogether.
No kings. No presidents. No masters of any kind. You rule yourself, you are your own leader. Act like it.