https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/10/karen-kwiatkowski/will-we-see-a-new-era-of-truly-popular-anti-statism/

By Karen Kwiatkowski
October 20, 2025

“No Kings” may be the first time I can recall clapping for a bunch of entitled, Starbuck’s drinking, middle-aged lefties and global communist money launderers. Is our national conversation getting closer to real anti-authoritarianism, even anti-statism?

If we rely on the No Kings crowd as an indicator, the answer is no. They demand more government, modern monetary theory at home and abroad, and the replacement of Trump with a President who won’t challenge the other two branches to do their jobs. Most are content to ignore the Constitution, not exercise it. The selected color for this “revolution” is yellow for optimism; the “color of democracy.” There’s a lot of black as well, begging the question of whether they are really just Proud Boys in ladysuits. The expert troll himself jumped in, with his bright yellow tie just a few days before the No Kings rally.

Any protest against authoritarianism and the state must be welcomed, in the mode of Thomas Paine. Radical, brave, and with only his life to lose, he valued independence of self and mind, always chose reason over the stupid crowd, believed that blind faith in the state could be corrected by facts and logic. He boldly welcomed trouble in his time, so the next generation might have peace.

We all have a little Tom Paine in us, and no doubt we are blessed with a multitude of modern crises in which to nurture that bold seed of sheer contempt for the criminal state. Those of us who quell our Tom Paine urges and sensibilities will indeed lose badly. Beyond remaining slaves and dying as slaves, we will condemn our children to both slavery and war. On the other hand, what better time than now to exult and celebrate the man who understood that “…taxes are not raised to carry on wars, but that wars are raised to carry on taxes.”

We might assume, from the Declaration of Independence, and from the fundamentals of the Philadelphia trick, that the supreme cause for which man forms a “government” is liberty, and from liberty, man garners peace and prosperity. Paine wrote, “Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.”

I suspect most Americans – far beyond the mostly urban and purely political “No Kings” celebrants – would agree with Tom Paine that it adds insult to injury that we are forced to pay in full, and obey unconditionally, the very criminal and obscene government that oppresses us and much of the world. (end snip - more on link above^)