No King. No Crown. No Clue

We rage at the circus and ignore the empire

You want to protest something real this weekend? Skip the fake royalty cosplay. Head to the big military parade and hold up a sign that says, “Stop Killing People In My Name.” or “Bread Not Bombs” Let’s see how many social media likes and minutes on TV that gets you.

Because while you're crying about who gets to nap in the Oval Office, the U.S. military budget dwarfs not just every other country, but most of them combined. Our defense budget makes Russia and China look like a couple of kids selling lemonade at the end of a dusty driveway.

And just when you thought that grotesque pile of spending couldn’t get any more bloated, guess what Congress did in the Big Beautiful Bill? They gave the Pentagon a 17.7% raise. That’s right, while you are screaming about cutting social programs, food assistance, and basic human services, they quietly handed the war machine an extra $150 billion like it was pocket change. Try talking rationally that we should switch out that $150 billion increase to the social programs and no politician hears it?

No debate. No filibuster. No “how do we pay for it?” Not a damn whisper of fiscal responsibility when it's bombs and bullets on the receipt. No Main Stream Media or Main Street outrage, not a single word is ever mentioned….

If you’re looking for the true bipartisan consensus in America, it’s war profits. Doesn’t matter who’s in the White House, red tie, blue tie, Rainbow Pride or MAGA hat: they all feed the beast.

Where is the media outrage on that? If you don’t believe the mass media is just a PR firm for the machine, what further proof do you need?

Nobody’s out there marching with a sign that says, “Close the Pentagon’s tab.” Nobody's calling for term limits on Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, or Raytheon. But post a meme about the king, nazis, or fascism, and boom, you're a revolutionary.

So it's No King's Day now. Real cute. Yeah, one problem, semantics, right? We don't have a king. What we do have is a geriatric popularity contest with a rotating cast of handlers and speechwriters every four years. But sure, grab your cardboard, paint a crown on your sign, and hit the streets like you're about to storm the Bastille.

What exactly are they protesting against? Ask 10 protesters, get 12 answers. And not a single one, really, with detail. Just vibes and buzzwords.

Fascism. Hitler. Nazis. Democracy is in danger. Orange man is bad. I'm just here for the Instagram story.

Sadly, that last one is the most honest. It's protest cosplay, and everyone wants to be the hero of the resistance. But nobody bothered to read the damn script.

Let's talk about that script. The system isn't broken right now. It's working exactly as it was designed. It is fighting back and winning, but it's slow. It's cynical. It's predictable. Congress lumbers. Executive orders fly around like spam.

And the courts? Have you ever been to court? That's where hope goes to wait for five hours on a wooden bench with no Wi-Fi and not even a deli number system to let you know when it's your turn. It's just endless stacks of paper in a country that supposedly leads the world in technology. But the legal system still runs on ink, toner, and time lost forever.

This isn't tyranny. It's bureaucracy with a side of dementia. Sure, the rhetoric is so much louder these days, right? The media is making dam sure of that, banking on your outrage with clickbait. But let's not pretend this is some uniquely terrifying era. Trump rants like a carnival barker, without a doubt. So much stupid shit comes out of that man's mouth. But let's not forget, Biden was there right before, the King of word salad. And if we're playing that game, which old man’s brain is closer to the end? Joe's got that lead in the clubhouse by at least 10 strokes, right?

Still, neither of them is Caesar. Neither of them is Hitler. Calling either one a king is an insult to monarchs and dictionaries. And yet, while you're out there hashtag resisting the phantom king, right down the street is the real show of power. A military parade for the 250th birthday of the US Army. Jets flying overhead, tanks and rocket launchers on the asphalt, trillions in taxpayer-funded hardware rolling through DC like it's a Flag Day flex-off.

Now that's America's biggest brand, not democracy. Heck, we're not even a democracy, right? We're a republic. But who needs semantics when there's a hashtag to trend? Think about it. What's our most significant import? Not Coca-Cola, not Levis, not even Hollywood. It's the Pentagon, baby. We don't export freedom. We export brute force, dressed up in fireworks and freedom fries.

Remember Vietnam, Iraq? The difference was in the packaging. Vietnam came away with grainy protest photos and napalm horrors. Iraq had a primetime pilot episode made for TV, “Shock and Awe”, sponsored by CNN, and the ratings were higher than the Super Bowl. Better production value, same ending. A war sold on lies, just with a best-of-breed camera crew, cleaner font, and a better PR firm.

The war machine. Red, blue, this is the machine that runs no matter who you vote for, right? And here's the part that gets me. Very few people protest that. They don't protest the drones, not the secret wars, not that quiet little meddling operation in places most Americans can't even pronounce. But say no King's Day and it's selfie time, baby.

Meanwhile, war is the only true bipartisan agreement. Bombs and the people they hit don't care which side of the aisle launched them, and both continuously do, right? One of my heroes, Muhammad Ali, really protested. He refused to fight in Vietnam, said “Man, I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger”, and they threw him in jail. He lost years of his career telling the truth. He paid a price. What do you lose? Nothing. You gain your likes, right? Applause, digital fist bumps.

So, yeah, go ahead and wear your little crown of thorns, post your reel, and feel righteous. But if you're not ready to protest the real power, the kind that drops the bombs and kills people and rewrites history, but hides behind that patriotism and plausible deniability, eh, maybe I'll sit this one out, right?

Because an empty protest, that's just applause for your own moral vanity. And the world doesn't need more fucking FaceBook likes. It needs some courage.

And while you're out there, maybe take a second to think about the people who didn't get a parade, the real soldiers, the real ones who came home missing limbs, haunted by sounds no fireworks can match, who gave everything because they believed in something bigger than a selfie.

That's why I got involved with Your Veterans History. Not a protest, no signs, just stories, the true ones from the real heroes, from the people who paid the real price of our government. The tanks, the planes, the missiles, and the trillions we spent on them don't tell the actual cost of the war. The people do.

If you've got someone in your life who wore our uniform and paid the price, this weekend is a better time to honor them than to march in the streets with a slogan you don't even understand.

Check out www.yourveteranshistory.com.

Let us help tell their story because remembering matters more than posturing. And some stories are worth more than a made-for-social-media protest ever will be.

And maybe, just maybe, when we collect the millions of stories of people who have paid the real price for us all, we all will know what we really should be protesting in this country.