No Kings is a front for the Democratic Party

Think you can radicalize liberals? They hate the left and just want to go back to brunch

A friend of mine just wrote on Facebook about the No Kings parade today, “This is your opportunity to come into contact with a large group of folks who can be radicalized” is ahistorical, without evidence, and patently absurd.

There is a gaping fallacy in this statement, and it makes me wonder how many leftists know any real liberals.

The liberals who will be out in droves today don’t want to be radicalized. They think they have all the answers. First, a couple of caveats. You don’t need my permission to be out today. Do whatever you want. Nor am I a corner boy whose job is to sling hope to leftists desperate for a fix of fantasies to staunch their existential suffering. Maybe there isn’t any fucking hope and it all ends in a long night of barbarism.

Because I have spent 20+ years interviewing thousands of Americans and giving public talks where I engage with liberals, I have a good idea of how their worldview operates.

Liberals think leftists are petulant violent children who spoil it for everyone else.

Liberals think we handed the election to Trump by protesting the genocide of Palestinians. They don’t want anything to fundamentally change.

Let me give you just one example. Last fall, while speaking on a panel in D.C. after a screening of “Occupy Wall Street: An American Dream,” one audience member spoke up. I knew them. They are a medical doctor, accomplished researcher, highly educated, and reasonably well off.

They said, “Why can’t the left and liberals work together like the right does? We agree on the same things about housing, healthcare, jobs. Voters decide the leaders of the party. We just need to elect the right people, and they will pass the right policies, and then we can talk about rights for Palestinians.”

That is the liberal mindset. Who cares how many Palestinians are massacred as long as we get ours? And Palestinians are just a stand-in for the entire Global South.

I have heard countless variations on this, as well as the claim that change only happens incrementally. Of course point out that Reaganism, the “war on terror,” and MAGA fascism all happened awfully fast and they will ignore you.

Liberals think the left, not fascists, are the problem and we need to just shut up and vote harder.

They still believe in "the system," and think Trump is a correctable aberration. The only way they may join the left is if they are impoverished and proletarianized. In other words, it's largely out of our hands. At best we can be there to help them make sense of the world if they become disillusioned with their liberal fantasies.

I have found time and again even when left-wing movements were in the drivers seat, there was not much opening to radicalize people unless they were already on that path. With the Iraq Antiwar Movement, most people thought Bush was the problem, not the imperial state. And that gave us Obama and his seven criminal wars. By the end of his presidency 80% of liberals SUPPORTED his murderous drone wars.

I covered Occupy Wall Street across the country. Apart from union members, most people over 30 who were at the encampments (outside cities like NYC, Chicago, and Oakland), did not even support a Kenyesian welfare state. Instead, they fetishized small businesses and fantasized that America should look like the Main Street from “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

I interviewed dozens of people at Bernie’s campaign rallies in 2020. There was considerable hostility to genuine socialist policies, such as government as employer of last resort, social housing, and public control of banking. Most of the people I talked to, even in NYC, thought socialism meant taxing the rich, taxpayer funded colleges, and Medicare for All, but nothing more.

There is a reason that No Kings is throwing 6 million Palestinians under the bus. They have nothing to say about Iran or Cuba or Venezuela, or all the other countries being tormented by the US. This is the most bizarre antiwar movement that ever existed. It doesn’t oppose any wars.

I will explain more later, but No Kings is run by Democratic Party operatives and is a front group for Democrats. Their role is protect the left flank of this astroturf movement from actual radicals.

If you think by showing up, you can “radicalize” liberals with a sign, a slogan, and a flyer, they will welcome you with open arms because you are no threat and they are getting you to silence your criticism of what No Kings is actually doing.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, these parades are a way for No Kings to generate publicity and capture millions of names and emails that their GOTV operation will then herd into the graveyard of the Democratic Party about six months from now.

In 2024 when the stakes were far higher, liberals and much of the left would not make a Holocaust of Palestinians a red line. They thought by ignoring genocide they could prevent fascism, and they refused to learn the lesson that supporting the party of genocide without real dissent gave us fascism.

No Kings and liberals would not lift a finger to prevent the extermination of billions of brown and Black people as long as they don’t have to see Tangerine Palpatine in office anymore and can go back to brunching on barbecued Palestinian babies.