No Kings
"No Kings Protest - Hyannis, Cape Cod, Massachusetts" by Santuit Studio is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.
[The Sunday Wire is the weekly newsletter of the Modern Whig Institute.]
In researching this edition of our weekly newsletter, I came across an amazing character: Amerigo Dumini, who was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1894 and died in Rome on Christmas Day in 1967. In between, he was a highly decorated Italian military hero in the First World War, became “Mussolini’s hitman” after it, eventually was semi-exiled, then sentenced to death by the British as a spy in North Africa and shot 17 times by a firing squad. He somehow survived and escaped, only to electrocute himself 24 years later while screwing in a light bulb. It’s some life story.
I can’t imagine what he told his grandkids when they asked him what he did in the war. Or wars.
The Essay
For all the sturm and drang from the administration and its supporters — or, to be more accurate, their fellow travelers — No Kings II went off without a hitch. In New York City, that alleged hotbed of antifa-inspired violent radicalism, over 100,000 demonstrators, and by some estimates as many as 350,000 participants, took to the streets. The NYPD reported zero protest-related arrests.
Zero.
According to USA Today, in Oklahoma City (which is apparently not an alleged hotbed of antifa-inspired violent radicalism, at least as far as Republican politicians are concerned, because no one mentioned it) the story was much the same: very large, peaceful protests attended not by radicals, but by ordinary citizens. And some of the demonstrators were probably the last people the reactionary right would expect.
U.S. Army veteran Brian Wofford, who was wounded while serving in Iraq, attended a rally in Oklahoma City in his green service coat emblazoned with the honors he had earned in the military.
"I was willing to die and lost a leg in a foreign country fighting for their rights," said Wofford, a lifelong Oklahoman who lives in Moore. "There’s no way I’m bending the only knee I have left for a king here in America. I can’t sit idly by while rights are trampled on and ignored, and people are pushed and treated like second-class citizens."
Whether the secretary of defense — or the president, for that matter — recognizes a true warfighter when he sees one is an open question. But the rest of us have no trouble knowing who we're hearing from. And considering the numbers of people who participated in the over 2,500 organized protests across the country, we don't like what we're currently hearing from our government. At all.
What we're hearing from each other, at least outside the expanding right-wing media bubble, is a commitment to principle: the rights of each and every individual under the jurisdiction of the United States must be vindicated by the government. The people insisting on that principle came from across the political and demographic spectrum, which may have come as quite a shock to the Speaker of the House, at least if he was sincere in his pregame prediction:
“We call it the ‘Hate America’ rally that’ll happen Saturday,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said earlier this week. “Let’s see who shows up for that. I bet you see pro-Hamas supporters. I bet you see Antifa types. I bet you see the Marxists on full display.”
Hopefully, for his own financial well-being, Speaker Johnson isn't much on sports gambling.
Of course, no one is really fooled by any of the MAGA rhetoric — unless they want to be. The authoritarian playbook is too well known; all the plays they're running are too familiar. After all, we've seen it play out in other countries for decades. It's been over a century since Mussolini and his National Fascist Party marched on Rome. Stalin’s brutal and disastrous 30-year reign of terror began around the same time. Hitler seized power — legally and constitutionally, as did the others — about a decade later.
As different as these three European dictators were, they shared a common tactic: they created a cult of personality, then through propaganda merged the national identity of their countries with their own and made personal loyalty to them the equivalent of loyalty to the nation. To be a patriotic Italian or Russian or German meant obedience to Il Duce, or Comrade Stalin, or Der Führer. Any resistance to them, let alone protest against them, was the equivalent of treason.
All of which may sound familiar. Fortunately, we’re nowhere near the situation Europe found itself in all those years ago. At least, not yet. If we were, you wouldn’t be reading this. You wouldn’t have seen the mass gathering of 7 million people (and maybe more) in public spaces across the country to openly mock and defy the president. As much damage as the president and his administration have done to the federal government, and as bad as things are sure to get as the damage spreads, we’re proving to be much harder to subjugate than he may have thought.
And that’s because we Americans, or at least a majority of us, instinctually embrace the ethos of No Kings regardless of where we stand politically. It’s who we are. And those of us who still believe in civics and the Constitution and the very foundations of our democratic republic remember well the words of the first Modern Whig president (although he may not have called himself that at the time), Theodore Roosevelt:
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
― Theodore Roosevelt
Morally treasonable. Strong words from a strong man. But he was right. Ultimately, we began with a moral proposition, laid out in both soaring rhetoric and practical detail — the best of us excel at both — in the Declaration of Independence. We were founded on a moral idea. Our purpose was to morally vindicate our God-given individual rights. And while we haven’t always done it well, and too often have been guilty of the very things we were pledged to resist, at least we’ve been honest enough to admit it, try and make amends, and do better.
And everywhere, at all times, no matter the circumstances, we have opposed tyranny. More than anything else, that is the American Way.
Odds and Ends
I wonder if these guys were issued XL masks:
Some National Guard replaced in Illinois for not meeting standards
Great piece on The Second Reconstruction (that's our phrase for it, and we're going to have a lot to say about it):
This No Kings Day, The UnPopulist Launches ‘The Reconstruction Agenda’
Is this the greatest side hustle of all time? Or just the most fun?
The Suburban Dad Who Calls Plays for 100 College Football Teams - WSJ
Think "fake news" is new? Think again:
Enchanting Imposters - JSTOR Daily
Hunter S. Thompson was unquestionably a piece of work. But just as in his work, the real story was the story behind the story:
The Rise and Fall of Hunter S. Thompson (Part 1 of 3)
Hannah Arendt, as a foremost expert on the fascism of her time, has come back into vogue. But her great and lasting friendship with one of the great philosophers of art is less well known:
Harold Rosenberg exhorted artists to take action and resist cliché | Aeon Essays
Okay, butterflies are free, but this is taking it a bit too far:
And finally, the coolest thing about this story may actually be the spare strapped to the trunk:
Look: Driver stopped in California for using a hand-drawn license plate - UPI.com
Kevin J. Rogers is the executive director of the Modern Whig Institute. He can be reached at director@modernwhiginstitute.org
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