What “No Kings” reveals about L.A. and California

With vanishingly few exceptions, these people cannot be taken seriously

Yeah, that’ll do the trick. Photo courtesy AP.

For the time it takes to read this post, set aside your feelings about Donald Trump. I know, for many of you that’s a tall order. None of what follows suggests that the issues raised by today’s No Kings protests aren’t serious. The point is that the protesters themselves are deeply unserious. The protests say far more about the protesters than any particular topic at hand.

As I write, hundreds of thousands of people are gathered in cities around California, and the country, for the third day of those No Kings protests (by the way, that’s one of the worst names for a protest in history). They’re protesting ICE raids, the Iran War, the Trump family’s corruption and Donald Trump in general. Some will toss in climate change and Israel, because why not.

I’ll preface what follows by saying this: Interspersed among the protesters there are no doubt sincere people. There are people who spend their time outside a two hour protest legitimately working to make their community, and their state, better. There is plenty to protest, and there are good people out there. Those are my peeps.

On balance, though, the No Kings protests are a farce.

There’s plenty to protest — but here’s the thing. There’s also an enormous amount to protest right here in L.A. and in California. Over the last 15 years, aka the Brown-Newsom Era, California has entered a death spiral from which it may never fully recover. Entire neighborhoods, entire towns, have literally burned to the ground. People are fleeing by the millions. Millions more live on the brink of poverty. The wealthiest state in the wealthiest nation in human history, with the world’s fourth largest economy, is tied with Louisiana for the nation’s highest poverty rate. Homeless people are dying by the tens of thousands. For all but the wealthiest, the economy is a train wreck.

Speaking of train wrecks, the state has spent $15 billion of the people’s money to not lay a single foot of track for high speed rail, even as the roads and highways upon which 40 million actual people rely have deteriorated to the worst in the country. Two years ago the 10 freeway in downtown L.A. literally caught fire. How screwed up do things have to be for concrete and steel to catch fire?

That should have been L.A.’s, and California’s, Cuyahoga River moment. Instead, officials patted each other on the back for repairing the viaduct in record time. This is akin to the coroner’s office congratulating themselves for getting the body to the morgue on time.

This year, the political class will steal more than $320 billion from the state’s residents, and spend it to make everything worse.

Where are the mass protests over the state’s — oh, let’s call it “leadership” — catastrophic failure to handle the homelessness crisis? Tens of billions of spent, and the only people who’ve benefitted are the hucksters at “nonprofits” like St. Joseph Center and Venice Family Clinic, “public interest” lawyers who fight tooth and nail to make sure progress is not made, and the wealthy real estate developers who are laughing their way to the bank every single day. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of homeless people have died over the last decade.

Where’s the outrage? Is mass deportation really worse than mass death? The deportations are relatively recent events. The mass death on our streets has been going on for two decades now. And people don’t care enough to raise their voices over that? They’re more concerned about criminal illegals than their own fellow citizens.

Where’s the self-righteous indignation when it comes to the hideous state of public schools, especially those that serve the immigrants and minorities the protestors so piously claim to care about when it comes to ICE? They take to the streets when someone shoots up a school in another state, but sit on their backsides in silent complicity while public schools in their own towns systematically murder the futures of hundreds of thousands of kids? These macabre factories of failure are also the situs of rampant sexual and physical abuse, violence, and institutional brainwashing. They produce young adults who know their pronouns but can’t locate Sacramento on a map, name the governor, or add more than 2+2. 

Apparently the No Kings all totally cool with that. But Trump sends a few Mexicans home and they lose their everloving minds. Incidentally, their hero Barack Obama deported more than three times as many people as Trump. They were cool with that, too, because he was just so dreamy. Unlike Trump’s shock troops, I’m sure Obama’s immigration agents accomplished their feat by asking nicely. Never mind that no less than the ACLU accused the Obama administration of prioritizing “speed over fairness” when it came to deportations. That jawline!

Where were these people when it was revealed that leadership in the city and county of Los Angeles were asleep at the wheel in the weeks and days leading up to the worst and deadliest wildfires in the region’s history? Where were the social media campaigns demanding Mayor Karen Bass, who is guilty of the worst dereliction of duty in L.A. history, resign? Their friends in Minnesota got Tim Walz’s scalp over far lesser offenses.

Walz stepped down from his own reelection over a few hundred million in welfare fraud. During COVID, Newsom’s Employment Development Department lost between $30 and $60 billion to fraud, to go along with the $24 billion in homelessness spending his office acknowledged couldn’t be accounted for — and these protesting asshats reelected him by nearly a 2-1 margin.

Where’s the fury when innocent Californians are attacked, raped, and even murdered by the junkies and lunatics the political class allows to roam the streets by the tens of thousands? Where were the protests when a young doctor’s puppy died screaming in a house fire set by a vagrant in Venice? Where were they just last week, when squatters set a family’s house on fire and killed three of their dogs?

Where were they two months ago when two elderly sisters were killed in an apartment fire set by a vagrant serial arsonist in Hollywood? Where were they in 2022, when a woman was raped, sodomized, and beaten at gunpoint in a public bathroom in MacArthur Park by a man who’d been released from jail on a previous gun charge less than 24 hours prior, because of another fraud these same idiots elected, George Gascon?

There was nary a peep when Maria Del Consuelo Alarcon-Valdez and Yolanda Honda died in a fire.

Where were the chants? Where were the signs? Where was the demand for change?

Where was the “solidarity” last year when synagogues were attacked and two Jews were killed on the same day in L.A.?

Yet as we speak, they’re out there ululating about Renee Good and Alex Petri, a couple of nimrods who did everything they possibly could to get dead.

Their true colors are showing.

They’ve not only been deafeningly silent on life-and-death issues in their own state and town, like the docile sheep they are they’re going to keep reelecting the same people responsible for the mess, who keep their own asses stapled to a goddamn desk as Californians suffer and die.

I cannot take these protests seriously, nor should anyone. They’re going to show up for a couple of hours, chant their slogans, sing their songs, hit their vape pens, high five each other, and — excuse the expression — accomplish precisely fuck-all. The stakes could not possibly be lower, though they’ll tell themselves they’re “activated,” “having an impact,” and “speaking truth to power.”

As I write this post, people have been passing my front windows on their way to the No Kings protest in Santa Monica (I live a few blocks from the bluffs where it’s is being held). They don’t actually sound angry. They sound … giddy. They’re talking loudly. They’re already playing music. They’re acting like they’re on their way to the see-and-be-seen party of the month, not like outraged citizens of a budding fascist tyranny.

And that’s the tell. That’s the whole goddamn tell.

These protests aren’t serious. It’s a bunch of aging Boomers trying to recapture their 1960s youth and dopey Millennials who spend too much time on social media. I bumped into a neighbor on her way to the protest. She’s recently single, and she was dressed like she was heading for a singles’ mixer. Which to her is what the protest probably is. Her boobs looked great.

If you truly thought the Future of Democracy is at stake, you wouldn’t be dressing up in dragon and Pokemon costumes or wearing your sexiest push-up bra under a skimpy white tank top. You wouldn’t be singing and dancing and making out. You’d be acting like, you know, the Future of Democracy is at stake.

While they’re out there feeling good about themselves, vagrants will set around 100 fires in the state. Some of them will damage homes or property. Some will injure innocent people. Some may kill people. 

While they’re out there, between 15 and 20 homeless people will die on the streets and in public spaces, many of them in horrific ways. A few score more people will fall into homelessness for the first time.

While they’re out there, tens of thousands of kids in failing California public schools will be turning to alcohol, drugs, gangs and other self-destructive behavior that will all but ensure they will never get so much as a chance at normal, healthy, stable lives.

While they’re out there, the state will be spending $10,000 of our money per second to make everything worse.

Yet when it comes to all these issues people actually can affect in their own zip codes, lives they can literally save  — take your pick, for God’s sake —  they’re nowhere to be found. They’re literally holding their noses and stepping over the bodies on the way to their “protest.”

As the subject of an actual king would say, sod right off.