250 Years Later: “No king then, no king now.”

 Nov. 14, 2025

Millions of Americans took to the streets Oct. 18 to participate in a “No Kings” demonstration. Do Republican voters accept the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s view that those millions “hate America”? And does Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller really think the millions around the nation, or the 1,100 who demonstrated in Vigo County, are “stupid white hippies”?

No one I talked with in front of the Vigo County Courthouse at Terre Haute’s “No Kings” demonstration hates America. Not one appeared to be channeling Abie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin.

I read the signs displayed and talked to many of the demonstrators. Aside from invective aimed at our “out of control” and “mentally-challenged” president (their words, not mine), what I heard most was how the nation needed change. Change is a difficult concept to pin down. Change can nurture and achieve hope, it fills some with fear of the unknown, or it can elicit a ho-hum, 'I’m just living my life,' response. But when millions across the country fill the streets while masked military patrol in peaceful American cities, we all need to pay attention. Change is happening.

We are about to mark the 250th anniversary of our nation’s origins. Most historians hold the view that at the time of the American Revolution one-third of the colonists supported it, one-third opposed it and one-third tended their fields and milked their cows. And those were times of profound change.

In these times of political polarization, “No Kings” demonstrators choose to face the challenge of change. The president of the United States spends his time posting an immature A.I. poop video making fifth-grade fun of the demonstrators. The disengaged are “milking their cows” or only scanning the football point spreads. But serious political division exists in the land of the free and the home of the brave. As in 1776, these divisions are real and consequential. We all need to pay attention — British colonists could not escape their revolutionary times and it’s a coin toss if we can slip by our revolutionary present.

The Founding Fathers eloquently expressed the sentiments and concerns of “No Kings” participants. During the Revolutionary era, Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 71, saw people “beset, as they continually are, by the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate.”

With fitting directness, Thomas Jefferson proclaimed that under swaggering oligarchy, “the many are crushed under the weight of the few.” And who doubts Hamilton would employ a favorite term of his, “servile pliancy,” to describe the actions and behavior of Republican members of Congress and state legislatures today? These are not representatives of the people. Encased in the grip of wanna be King Trump’s impulsive self-aggrandizement, they are akin to courtiers desiring favors, fearing his impulsive wrath.

1. Just months ago we recognized “the shot heard round the world” on April 19, 1775, in Concord, Massachusetts. Patriots were engaged in a military encounter with the King’s troops. At that event, a celebration of our history, few political comparisons with the present were made. But I did read of one protest sign being displayed: “No king then, no king now.” Six months later millions of Americans are waving similar signs with resolve and determination.

--Gary Daily