The “No Kings" marches are built on a lie.
They present themselves as a principled revolt against concentrated power. In reality, they mean something much narrower: no “kings" from the wrong side, but plenty of rule from ours. No strong executive we dislike, but endless tolerance, and often praise, for bureaucratic coercion, speech policing, punitive redistribution, and high-handed moral supervision when the goals are approved by a permanent enlightened class and the rulers mouth the right ideological language.
Donald Trump unapologetically lends himself to their preferred caricatures. He is theatrical, combative, and openly drawn to command. He makes it easy for critics to reach for crowns, thrones, and authoritarian metaphors.
Fine. Protest his rhetoric. Protest his style. Protest his use of executive power. That is legitimate.
But what alarms his opponents is not merely his vibe. It is his speed, confidence, and effectiveness. Trump is frightening to them not only because he feels kingly to progressive sensibilities, but because he moves quickly, forcefully, and effectively while delivering policies they hate. The fact that he often does so through lawful constitutional channels only makes them more hysterical. When executive energy serves the wrong politics, they suddenly discover royal imagery and constitutional panic.
The people shouting “No Kings" do not actually object to concentrated power as such. They object to concentrated power they cannot control.
Give them a bureaucracy that polices speech, an expert class that claims authority to manage public opinion, or an administrative state that narrows the range of acceptable conduct for our own good, and their anti-monarchical passions cool very quickly.
The same is true of redistribution. The left dresses it up in the language of fairness, dignity, and compassion. But when the state claims a deeper right to the fruits of your labor because perceived social need outranks your claim to the fruits of your own competence, that is neither anti-kingly nor humane. It is a particularly pernicious form of tyranny marketed as kindness.
And now the mask slips still further. In blue-state America, the new frontier is not merely to tax achievement more heavily while pretending to admire it. It is to treat wealth itself as presumptively available for seizure, and if its creators flee the scene, to grab them on the way out. California’s proposed billionaire tax is not aimed at income but at net worth itself, a one-time raid on accumulated assets dressed up as social morality. Other blue states are moving in the same direction, and some contemplate exit-tax mechanisms for those who choose to leave rather than remain as fiscal livestock. Mamdani is planning the same for New York City.
No taxation without representation has become representation without limitation, then taxation without escape, then confiscation if you nevertheless manage to escape. Sounds like true tyranny.
If you built it, they want to tax it. If you keep it, they resent it. If you leave, they want to fine you for fleeing the scene of their failure. They call it fairness. More honestly, it is a departure tax imposed by people who produce nothing but claims. This is ideological piracy in a suit and credentialed smile. They did not build the company, create the product, take the risk, meet the payroll, or survive the lean years. But once someone else has done all that, they arrive like moral privateers determined to board the ship and carry off the cargo.
Their genius lies not in laying golden eggs, but in inventing ever more moral-sounding ways to crack them open and confiscate the contents - which is to say, they do not oppose kings at all. They simply insist on being the kings.
If you truly oppose tyranny, you should distrust not only the man on horseback, but also the smiling planner, the insulated bureaucrat, and the judge who discovers new powers whenever the Right must be restrained.
That principled stand was nowhere to be found during COVID. Nor is it visible in the Left’s ongoing romance with censorship and judicial power.
During the pandemic, churches were treated as civic hazards. Worship was framed as dangerous, irresponsible, and nonessential. Pastors who wanted to open their doors were cast as reckless and cruel. Then came the George Floyd protests, and the moral vocabulary changed overnight. Mass gathering was no longer a public-health offense when attached to an approved cause. It became a sacrament of justice. One kind of crowd was treated as lowly and dangerous. Another as noble and necessary. The point was not public health. It was that approved causes got a pass and disapproved ones did not.
The same authoritarian instinct appears in the Left’s embrace of censorship.
“Misinformation" and “disinformation" have become part of the holy liturgy of progressive politics, and sceptres of rule besides. These terms no longer function merely as descriptions of falsehood. They function as licenses for rule. They justify narrowing speech, throttling dissent, and treating ordinary citizens as too gullible to think for themselves.
The logic is always paternal. People cannot be trusted to sort truth from error on their own. Therefore experts, agencies, platforms, and approved institutions must manage the informational environment for the public’s own good. That is not democratic confidence. It is tyrannical contempt wrapped in benevolence.
The same double standard is visible in the Left’s love affair with judicial power. When progressive activists chant “No Kings," they somehow forget how much they adore black-robed monarchs who legislate from the bench whenever Donald Trump is the target. An executive acting energetically within his constitutional lane is denounced as authoritarian, while a district judge issuing sweeping orders against national policy is treated as a guardian angel of democracy.
That double standard has been especially visible in the torrent of litigation aimed at blocking Trump’s agenda. What we have seen is not merely constitutional contestation, but lawfare: the use of courts as political weapons when elections produce the wrong outcome. Again and again, the left and its legal auxiliaries have advanced strained, inventive, and often unprecedented arguments in hopes of crippling Trump through delay, disqualification, injunction, and judicial veto. If they cannot beat this Gulliver at the ballot box, the frustrated Lilliputians turn to activist judges.
And the abuse has not been limited to blocking Trump’s policies. The Left has repeatedly used legal instruments to attack Trump personally, pursuing in court what it has often failed to secure cleanly at the ballot box. This motive was not hidden. Democrats and anti-Trump operatives often said the quiet part out loud, campaigning not only against his ideas but on promises to investigate him, prosecute him, bankrupt him, disqualify him, and bury him through the machinery of law.
That is what lawfare looks like in its naked form.
The goal is not neutral justice. It is attrition, spectacle, stigma, and damage. Keep him in court. Keep him under accusation. Keep him spending money, losing time, and carrying the burden of endless legal suspicion. Even when the theories are weak, novel, inflated, selectively applied, and likely to be overturned, the process becomes the punishment.
Judicial power is sacred only so long as it serves the correct ideology. When it does not, the institution suddenly becomes another target to be resized, repacked, and repurposed so the Left can reassert what it takes to be its natural right to rule. The calls on the Left to pack the Supreme Court reveal their true tyrannical inclinations.
Although this essay is focused on an American phenomenon, the Israeli parallel is impossible to miss.
It is remarkable how two Leftist streams separated by an ocean can perform the same two-faced dance with such precision. In America, the Left wraps itself in anti-authoritarian slogans while cheering judges who block the right. In Israel, the Left wraps itself in the language of democracy while treating judicial supremacy as a sacred priesthood whenever it frustrates the nationalist camp.
And the pattern does not stop with the High Court. It extends to the long campaign to bleed Netanyahu through personalized and highly inflated allegedly criminal cases that have kept him dragged through court for years, as though legal siege were a substitute for electoral defeat and judicial attrition a respectable replacement for persuading the public. If he could not be removed cleanly by the voters, he could be weakened, distracted, and stained by endless judicial siege.
Nor is that power confined to the bench. In Israel, the attorney general has increasingly functioned not as a restrained legal adviser, but as a kind of unelected governing authority from her leftist perch, issuing unprecedented rulings and constraints with enormous practical force over elected officials.
Amazing, really. Two left-wing cultures, one in America and one in Israel, separated by an ocean yet dancing the same shabby routine. In the two places the slogan changes, the accent changes, the legal vocabulary changes, but the instinct is identical. When the Right wins elections, we are told to fear power. When courts, legal mandarins, and bureaucratic elites override the Right and the will of the voters, we are told to celebrate democracy.
It is the same dirty trick in two languages.
Regardless of the continent on which they gnash their teeth, these people do not oppose rule from above. They oppose it only when it serves the wrong side. Give them a bureaucracy to police speech, judges to overrule voters, or a state apparatus to regulate private life in the name of compassion, and they do not see tyranny. They see virtue in command.
The “No Kings" marches do not express principle. They express a demand for their own preferred rulers - robed, bureaucratic, managerial, and safely beyond the reach of the electorate. It is long past time the American and Israeli electorates sent the true tyrants packing.
Daniel Winston is an American-Israeli therapist, writer, and lecturer and was an advisor to one of Israel’s Prime Ministers.