Across the country on June 14 and again in mid-October, a coordinated campaign called “No Kings” filled streets from small towns to big cities, with organizers and media boasting massive turnout and scenes that organizers called a stand against authoritarianism. What the press calls a spontaneous ground swell was anything but spontaneous — it was a national, highly choreographed event timed to coincide with the Army’s 250th anniversary parade and the President’s birthday in Washington.
Reporters celebrated the pageantry: human banners, singalongs and people carrying upside-down flags have been paraded on cable as proof of a righteous movement against tyranny. But look closer and the message was narrower and political — a nationwide boycott of an American celebration, amplified by left-wing groups who have perfected the art of theatrical outrage.
President Trump, who led the parade and stood with the military that day, pushed back hard against the spectacle and the organizers, telling the country not to mistake pageant politics for patriotism. He has long had little patience for street mobs and has repeatedly described radical opponents with the blunt language Americans actually understand; his critics may whine, but he isn’t going to be lectured by people who cheer when the flag is turned upside down.
Conservative Americans watched those same scenes and saw a different story: a media-fed demonstration that trafficked in symbolism over substance and targeted the military and law-abiding citizens who love this country. Networks sympathetic to the movement have been happy to sanitize and package the rallies as wholesome civic action, while downplaying the left-wing groups and financiers who organized and bankrolled it.
Don’t be fooled by the feel-good camera angles — many of the events were organized through national activist outfits like 50501 and Indivisible, groups with long records of turning protests into political theater and electoral pressure. This isn’t grassroots civic virtue; it’s a nationwide political operation designed to shame and disrupt, and ordinary Americans are right to question motives when billionaires and national groups fund coordinated actions across every state.
Meanwhile, governors and local officials were forced to prepare for trouble, mobilizing National Guard units and increasing police presence in cities where organizers promised mass disruption. Law and order matters — patriots shouldn’t have to watch their streets be turned into protest stages or see federal celebrations turned into anti-American spectacles without a voice of common sense defending stability and respect for the institutions that keep us free.
If millions of Americans showed up to support their country’s institutions and its military, that’s the story the country should be talking about — not a well-funded, social-media-era campaign that elects to shout rather than build. The President’s blunt rebuke of these mobs reflects a larger truth conservatives know: real patriotism is about unity and respect, not performative rage, and we won’t let self-righteous agitators redefine what it means to love America.
