Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

King-less?
Kunstler.com ^ | 16 Jun, 2025 | James Howard Kunstler

Posted on 06/17/2025 4:15:37 AM PDT by MtnClimber

"Realize where we are." — Oilfield Rando on "X".

Saturday morning, we toodled over to the next town, Salem, New York, (pop. 2,612, per capita income $19,499) fifty miles northeast of Albany, to catch one of the hundreds of “No Kings” demos across the nation sponsored by Shanghai-based software billionaire Neville Roy Singham, Walmart heiress Christy Walton, Paypal partner (and Linked-in founder) Reid Hoffman, and father-and son team, George and Alex Soros.

Speaking of Alex Soros, Saturday also happened to be his wedding day, to Huma Abedin, former Hillary Clinton sidekick and BFF (and ex-wife of disgraced congressman and convicted sex offender Anthony Weiner.) The nuptials happened at the Soros’s Hamptons estate. Cable news covered the fabulous cavalcade of black Escalade limousines conveying the super-elite of Progressive-Wokery to the glorious event. The New York Times, with its habitual lack of self-awareness, styled the event thusly:

“Liberal royalty?” Say, what. . . ? There is such a thing? In the party of No Kings? What’s the deal, then? Just princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses, earls, viscounts, baronets, lairds, marquis, knights and dames, and so on. Yet, no king? Well, if you asked the fortunate wedding guests, they might aver to Hillary Clinton as a sort-of Queen of the party, or maybe just Queen Bee. As for former president Bill, he appears to be undergoing slow-motion mummification, so he currently occupies an ambiguous zone between this world and the next, with no mojo left for kingly duties. Anyway, it rained that day down on the South Fork.

Meanwhile, back upstate, cloudy and cool but no rain, some two-hundred wrathful plebeian souls gathered at the one-stoplight-intersection in little Salem, these days mainly a farm community, the old railroad engine repair shop defunct, and many good non-farm jobs with it, the usual story in this corner of the country. The hopped-up crowd was well-supplied with signs and placards, many avouching Down with Oligarchs! — which, oddly, seemed a sort of backhanded reference to billionaires of the very type underwriting the day’s festivities, not to mention the super-rich “liberal royalty” gang gathered for the Soros-Abedin royal wedding.

But that was only one of the many incongruities haunting the mass protest against the abhorred president, Mr. Trump. For instance, one poor fellow on the southeast corner of South Main and East Broadway inveighed mournfully against the suppression of free speech, apparently unaware of the epic efforts 2021 to 2025 by “Joe Biden’s” underlings to censor the Internet and de-platform the regime’s critics (including yours truly, whose website was mysteriously destroyed in October 2024).

The moiling mob was overwhelmingly geriatric, perhaps reflecting the backwater demographics of a region with few job opportunities for young folk. A spirit of revival bubbled among them as they reenacted old rituals of the hippie halcyon, the grand old days of the Vietnam War protests, when thousands gathered to levitate the Pentagon. Only now, their sentiments and beliefs exhibit a striking and peculiar inversion of the ancient 1960s credos that drove the beloved Movement.

I know because I was there, on campus, between 1966 and 1971. Back then, the Left opposed the wicked “establishment” and all its nefarious operations, from the war in Vietnam to the FBI’s underhanded suppression of political dissent. These days, strange to relate, the Left stands in staunch defense of the Deep State, big government (and its prodigious corruption), and the politicization of the FBI and CIA.

Original thinking among the Woke

Their placards lament the withering of “our democracy,” yet they were just fine with “Joe Biden” selecting a 2024 presidential candidate for them — with no customary vote by party delegates, or anything approaching an open democratic process. They shout for the “rule-of-law,” except when it concerns special persons such as the former president’s crackhead, bag-man son. They’re all for the colossal grift around the war in Ukraine. And don’t forget they supported vaccine mandates, the closing and ruination of small businesses (while Walmart and Taco Bell were allowed to thrive), and all the other hypocritical, fraudulent, lethal actions of Covid-19 policy.

The object of the “No Kings” shuck and jive, you might suspect, was to prepare so many friction-points around the country that violence was apt to erupt in order to create a George Floyd-type martyr figure, so as to re-energize the Left for another sustained summer of riots. There was plenty of mayhem around the country but, alas, no martyr emerged, no apotheosis of “progressive” victim-hood. . . only the peculiar murder of two Minnesota legislators by an apparently deranged Democratic party fringe character, the sometime evangelist and Tim Walz appointee, Vance Boelter.

$65-million is a plausible number for the money spent by billionaires and political NGOs on the nation-wide “No Kings” project. A lot of that was paid directly to protesters for just showing up. (They ran ads on Craig’s List to enlist players.) None of them showed up in the Hamptons, though, where “liberal royalty” assembled for their special event. You’ve got to think that they missed something rather bigly there.


TOPICS: Society
KEYWORDS: jhk; kunstler

Click here: to donate by Credit Card

Or here: to donate by PayPal

Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794

Thank you very much and God bless you.


1 posted on 06/17/2025 4:15:37 AM PDT by MtnClimber
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber

What about “No one is above the law”?


2 posted on 06/17/2025 4:16:11 AM PDT by MtnClimber (For photos of scenery, wildlife and climbing, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: little jeremiah; MtnClimber; Carriage Hill; GOPJ; Mama Shawna; notdownwidems; ...

James Howard Kunstler ping


3 posted on 06/17/2025 4:17:20 AM PDT by MtnClimber (For photos of scenery, wildlife and climbing, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber
Salem, New York, (pop. 2,612, per capita income $19,499)

I thought WTF, how can anyone survive in NY on that income. Turns out the source is Wikipedia, per the Census Reporter indicates the per capita income for the town is $44,686.
4 posted on 06/17/2025 4:21:29 AM PDT by where's_the_Outrage? (Drain the Swamp. Build the Wall)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber

Stupid people doing stupid things.


5 posted on 06/17/2025 4:21:37 AM PDT by wetgundog
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber

The ‘Rat Party - The party of the decadent, vacuous, elitist rich and their clueless, maladgusted “help”.


6 posted on 06/17/2025 4:38:11 AM PDT by TTFlyer (Lenin: that by the infliction of terror, a well-organized minority can conquer a nation.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber

It’s good to see that these leftist billionaires are being forced to spend their own money for their Trump hatred now that the US money going to their NGOs is starting to dry up. Their money supply might be large, but it’s not endless.


7 posted on 06/17/2025 5:12:24 AM PDT by norwaypinesavage (Freud: projection is a defense mechanism of those struggling with inferiority complexes)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber

All credit to my brother, who said “Does NO KINGS include Martin Luther King?”


8 posted on 06/17/2025 5:23:28 AM PDT by BikerJoe
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber

They don’t want kings! Instead, they want everything run by queens!


9 posted on 06/17/2025 5:34:56 AM PDT by 17th Miss Regt (Fascist, deplorable, and proud of it!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber

We’ve made great progress in 8 years...

They’ve gone from calling him “Hitler” to calling him a “King”. Give him two more terms, and they may even call him “my President”.


10 posted on 06/17/2025 5:41:19 AM PDT by XEHRpa
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber

Once again liberals misquote for their own lies.

The quote is attributed to John Adams ... “no King but King Jesus.”

Makes a big difference.


11 posted on 06/17/2025 5:41:50 AM PDT by Mrs.Z ("Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save." Ps 146:3)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber
Love that picture...The sign reads: 'They blame Immigrants so you won't blame billionaires'.

Dumbasses, don't you know 97% of Billionaires are Democrats?

12 posted on 06/17/2025 5:53:19 AM PDT by DeplorableTrumpSupporter (FKA ConservaTeen)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber

What does No Kings even mean. The guy had his home raided by the FBI over a fake charge. King?


13 posted on 06/17/2025 6:36:48 AM PDT by bray (It's not racist to be racist against races the DNC hates.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber
...sponsored by Shanghai-based software billionaire Neville Roy Singham...

Does he also sponsor 'no emporor' protests against Xi the Pooh?
14 posted on 06/17/2025 7:32:35 AM PDT by posterchild
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: posterchild
Does he also sponsor 'no emporor' protests against Xi the Pooh?

Good point, he is a huge CCP supporter.

15 posted on 06/17/2025 7:43:37 AM PDT by MtnClimber (For photos of scenery, wildlife and climbing, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 14 | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber

ugh, i misspelled emperor


16 posted on 06/17/2025 8:06:25 AM PDT by posterchild
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 15 | View Replies]

To: where's_the_Outrage?
per the Census Reporter indicates the per capita income for the town is $44,686

Per capita, or per household? I work with Census Data for bank regulation compliance, and most of the data is per household or per family.
17 posted on 06/17/2025 8:16:37 AM PDT by Dr. Sivana ("Whatsoever he shall say to you, do ye." (John 2:5))
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 4 | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber

5 MILLION protesters: $65 MILLION : $13 per person


18 posted on 06/17/2025 9:09:32 AM PDT by ridesthemiles (not giving up on TRUMP---EVER)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber; All

19 posted on 06/17/2025 1:25:32 PM PDT by Carriage Hill (A society grows great when old men plant trees, in whose shade they know they will never sit.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Carriage Hill

🙏🙏🙏AMEN !!! 🙏🙏🙏


20 posted on 06/17/2025 3:03:54 PM PDT by mabarker1 ((Congress- the opposite of PROGRESS!!! I’m a fraud, hypocrite & liar. I'm a member of Congress!! )
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 19 | View Replies]

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson