Peter Girnus 🦅@gothburz
I am the No Kings Rally.
I roll out every cycle like clockwork. Same as the cicadas but with better signage and worse ideas. March 28, 2026. Flagship in St. Paul, Minnesota State Capitol. Springsteen debuting a new protest anthem. Net worth $1.2 billion. Fonda. Baez. Bernie. The green room at my anti-aristocracy rally has more combined wealth than the zip codes the crowd drove in from. Eight million people across 3,300 events on six continents. The largest mass mobilization in American history, organized to remind you that we don't have a king. Never did. The Constitution was written by men who'd seen kings up close and decided "nah."
But here's the thing about kings. Everybody knows what a king looks like. You can see the crown. You can storm the castle. Kings are legible.
What we have is worse. What we have is an aristocracy.
An aristocracy doesn't wear a crown. It wears a lanyard. It doesn't rule by decree. It rules by access. Access to capital, to media, to the credentials that determine who gets to speak and who gets to listen. It doesn't need a throne when it has a donor class, a credentialing pipeline, and a party apparatus that selects its leaders the way a medieval court appoints a regent. Kings are overthrown. Aristocracies are inherited. And the American aristocracy has learned the one trick that keeps it immortal: it learned to call itself democracy.
I am the annual rally where the aristocracy puts on its costume and pretends to be the people. Business is booming.
No Kings, they chant. Meanwhile the party's leading 2028 hopeful, Governor Gavin Newsom, spent the last year cosplaying as president from a state with the nation's highest poverty rate. When Trump accidentally called him "the president of the United States" on live television, Newsom's official press office ran with it. All caps. Trump's own style. Declaring himself president, canceling all executive orders, firing Stephen Miller, announcing free healthcare and legal cannabis. One hundred thirty-two thousand likes. Performance art as governance. Then came the "Patriot Shop." Red hats that say "Newsom Was Right About Everything." One-hundred-dollar Bibles, signed. The branding rips off MAGA because the aristocracy has always understood that you defeat the populists by becoming them, aesthetically, without changing a single policy.
He went to the Munich Security Conference and played Governor of the Free World while his own state can't house its residents. California: 187,000 homeless. Supplemental poverty rate of 17.7 percent, the worst in America. A projected $68 billion deficit that his office papered over by raiding the rainy day fund and borrowing against itself, a year after he hallucinated a $97.5 billion surplus and announced, his actual words, "No other state in American history has ever experienced a surplus as large as this." The surplus evaporated. The deficit compounded. The Legislative Analyst's Office projected $155 billion in cumulative shortfall through 2028. But the merch is selling.
This is the man the No Kings coalition is grooming to lead the republic. The crown fits. That's the problem. It always fits the next one in line.
No Kings, they chant. But they don't mean it. They never meant it. Ask Bernie Sanders.
In 2016, the DNC rigged the scales so thoroughly that their own chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had to resign in disgrace when the emails leaked. The CEO resigned. The CFO resigned. The communications director resigned. Four heads rolled and the party called it a staffing change. But the emails were just the surface. The real architecture was worse. In November 2017, former DNC interim chair Donna Brazile revealed that the Clinton campaign had signed a Joint Fund-Raising Agreement in August 2015, a full year before the nomination, that gave Clinton's campaign control of the party's finances, strategy, staffing, and all hiring decisions. The party was $24 million in debt. Clinton paid it off and bought it. The entire apparatus. A year before a single vote was cast. Brazile's own words: "If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided."
The aristocracy doesn't seize power. It purchases it, files the receipt, and calls it "fund-raising."
Sanders won 23 states and 13 million votes and the party treated him like a shoplifter.
In 2020, they let him build a lead through Iowa and New Hampshire and Nevada, then panicked. In the span of 48 hours before Super Tuesday, Buttigieg and Klobuchar dropped out and endorsed Biden. Beto O'Rourke joined them at a rally in Dallas the night before the vote. Obama's finance director emailed 500 bundlers that Monday morning: "We need all hands on deck." Jim Clyburn delivered South Carolina — exit polls showed nearly half of voters said his endorsement mattered — and the operation was complete. Bloomberg dropped out the next morning and endorsed Biden. The base wanted Bernie. The aristocracy wanted continuity. Continuity won.
Then came 2024. The masterpiece.
Joe Biden, the sitting president, was pushed off the ticket on July 21. After every primary had already been held. After 14 million Democrats had cast their ballots for him. Biden himself said: "I received over 14 million votes, 87 percent of the votes cast across the entire nominating process." Then the party told him those votes didn't count. Kamala Harris, who had dropped out of the 2020 primary in December 2019. Before Iowa. Before a single vote. Polling at three percent among her own party. Zero delegates. She was installed as the nominee. Delegates consolidated behind her within 36 hours. No convention fight. No debate. No alternative candidates. No democracy.
The party that named its movement "No Kings" chose its presidential candidate the way a board of directors appoints a CEO. Which is to say: the way an aristocracy has always done it. The court decides. The public ratifies. Participation is the costume.
Some of you in this crowd voted for Biden in the primary. Your vote was voided in July. You're here today holding a sign for the people who voided it. And you'll do it again in 2028. That's how you know the aristocracy works. It doesn't need your permission. It just needs your attendance.
They don't oppose kings. They oppose other people's kings.
While I was printing banners, the real country was on fire.
The Department of Homeland Security has been shut down for 42 days. By tomorrow it ties the longest funding lapse in American history. TSA agents have been screening your bags without paychecks since February 14. The acting TSA administrator testified to Congress that her agents have received eviction notices, had their cars repossessed, defaulted on loans, drained their retirement savings, are sleeping in their vehicles, selling blood and plasma to make rent. Three hundred sixty-six of them have quit. Houston Intercontinental has only two of five terminals operating. A third of its security lanes staffed. Three-hour waits. Congress left for a two-week recess the night after the Senate passed a bipartisan deal that the Speaker killed on arrival. Both parties torpedoed each other's proposals. They won't return until the week of April 13. By then the shutdown hits Day 60. Some of those members of Congress are here today. In St. Paul. Holding signs. The TSA agent screening bags without a paycheck is working. Her congressman is at my rally.
The guy we're protesting won the popular vote. First Republican to do that since 2004. Seventy-seven million Americans pulled the lever for him. Not the Electoral College trick from 2016. The actual popular vote. By a point and a half. But why let arithmetic ruin a perfectly good tantrum.
That's the part the aristocracy can't metabolize. The deplorables weren't supposed to win twice. Especially not the popular vote. The entire thesis of "No Kings" depends on the premise that this presidency is illegitimate, that it was imposed on a reluctant nation by structural manipulation. But the numbers say otherwise. So the aristocracy does what it always does when the numbers are inconvenient: it changes the subject. It talks about vibes. It prints a poster. It books Springsteen.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is not a diagnosis. It is a platform. And it is the only one left.
The party that once ran on healthcare, labor rights, and economic populism now runs on one man's name. Remove Trump from the equation and the aristocracy has nothing to sell you. No vision for the economy. No plan for housing. No position on the war. Just: "Not him." A restraining order cosplaying as a movement. And the rally is the filing.
I've done this before. January 2017. The Women's March. Five million people. The largest single-day protest in American history at the time. Name the bill it passed. Name the election it flipped. Name one policy that changed because five million people held signs for a day and went home. The Tea Party was smaller. It took over the House in two years. The difference is the Tea Party was a political operation. The Women's March was a rally. Rallies exhaust the impulse to act by simulating action. You showed up. You held the sign. You did your part. Go home. I am the pressure valve the aristocracy installs to make sure the steam never builds high enough to move anything.
The most obedient thing you can do in America is attend an approved protest on a permitted date in a designated area with a pre-printed sign about a pre-selected cause endorsed by the celebrities the aristocracy hired to make you feel brave. You showed up where they told you. When they told you. Holding what they gave you. Chanting what they wrote. Then you went home. If this rally threatened power, it wouldn't be permitted. Springsteen wouldn't be here. The Capitol Police would.
Here's what else happened while I was setting up sound check.
On February 28, the United States and Israel launched 900 strikes on Iran in twelve hours. Operation Epic Fury. They killed the Supreme Leader. They killed his wife, his daughter, his son-in-law, his 14-month-old grandchild.
They hit a girls' elementary school in Minab and killed 168 people. Most of them children. The school was triple-tapped. Three distinct strikes.
You know about the school. You chose the sign.
Amnesty International called it "deadly and unlawful." Iran fired back at American bases across nine countries. Thirteen American service members are dead. Nearly two thousand Iranians killed. The Strait of Hormuz is functionally closed. Oil has doubled to $108 a barrel. Mortgage rates are climbing back toward seven. This is happening right now, today, as I tune the PA in St. Paul. But nobody's chanting about that. Hard to fit "undeclared war with no congressional authorization that the House explicitly refused to constrain under the War Powers Act" on poster board.
The dollar you brought to my rally buys what 53 cents bought in 2000. Cumulative CPI is up nearly 90 percent nationally. Over 100 percent in San Francisco. Newsom's old city. The one he governed before he governed the state into the ground. The price of eggs, gas, rent, health insurance. All of it compounding for a quarter century across every administration, red and blue, while both parties printed money, deferred the bill, and told you the other guy was the problem. But I'm not here to talk about purchasing power. I'm here to talk about feelings.
Meanwhile, members of Congress traded hundreds of millions of dollars in stocks in 2025. Thirty-two percent of them outperformed the S&P 500. The same rate as professional fund managers, which is curious for people whose day job is legislation, not portfolio management. Senator Markwayne Mullin hid his trades for 953 days. Representative Lisa McClain filed 504 late disclosures in a single afternoon. Nancy Pelosi. Retiring in 2026. One last lap around the insider track. She turned roughly $700,000 in 1987 into $134 million today. A 16,930 percent return. Seven times the Dow over the same period. Her portfolio returned 71 percent in 2024 alone, nearly triple the S&P. The penalty for getting caught violating the STOCK Act? Two hundred dollars. The price of a decent dinner in the district she represents. And one user operating 38 Polymarket accounts made $2.14 million betting on the Iran strikes. $1.5 billion in S&P futures placed 10 to 15 minutes before the president's announcement. The CFTC won't investigate. Polymarket operates offshore. The administration killed the probe. But I'm not rallying about that either. Insider trading doesn't fit the aesthetic.
That's the aristocracy. Not a king. A court. Self-dealing, self-credentialing, self-exonerating. Operating in full daylight while telling you to look at the poster board.
Funny thing about kings. The closest America has come to one since George III wasn't a man in a red hat. It was 2020. Governors ruled by executive decree for months. All 50 declared states of emergency. Forty-two states issued stay-at-home orders. Curfews in New Jersey, Ohio, Puerto Rico. Rhode Island deployed the National Guard to stop cars with New York plates. Hawaii quarantined residents for traveling between islands. Churches padlocked while liquor stores stayed open. The Supreme Court had to intervene twice, in New York and California, to remind the government that the First Amendment still applied. They closed your business. Your school. For over a year in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York. Your mother's funeral, capped at 10 mourners. They told you which direction to walk down the grocery aisle. Walmart implemented it. Connecticut mandated it by law.
Then they mandated you take a pharmaceutical product to keep your job. Three and a half million federal workers, straight mandate, no testing alternative. Eighty-four million private-sector workers faced the same until the Supreme Court blocked it, 6 to 3. In New York City, they launched "Key to NYC." Show your vaccination card to eat at a restaurant, go to the gym, see a movie. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington. Show your papers. Compliance or exile. No vote. No debate. No sunset clause. Justice Gorsuch later called it "the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country." His words, not mine. On the record, in a Supreme Court concurrence.
The vaccine monarchies of 2020 were administered by the very same people now standing on my stage screaming "No Kings." Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who lobbied the CDC to keep schools closed well into 2021. She's speaking at my flagship event today. Keith Ellison, Minnesota's attorney general, who enforced the lockdown orders. He's on my stage. Peggy Flanagan, who served as lieutenant governor under Walz while Minnesota imposed some of the nation's strictest measures. She's here too. They didn't mind the crown when they were wearing it.
And Gavin Newsom. Who maintained emergency executive authority for nearly three years. Who banned indoor worship. Who was photographed maskless at the French Laundry with a dozen friends while his own orders said stay home. This is the man the aristocracy is positioning for 2028. The man who governed by decree and now chants "No Kings."
That's not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is accidental. This is architecture.
Let me tell you what the No Kings rally is. What it has always been.
It's where we come to pretend we're from Minneapolis. The movement started there. ICE agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January. Good was a 37-year-old poet and mother. She was sitting in her car. They shot her three times. Pretti was a 37-year-old VA nurse who saw agents grab a woman and intervened. They disarmed him. Then they shot him roughly ten times. Real people. Real grief. Real terror. What happened in Minneapolis was an occupation, and the community that organized against it did something the aristocracy never does: it put its body in the road.
But the aristocracy doesn't mourn Good and Pretti because they were killed. It mourns them because of who did the killing. Under Obama, ICE deported 2,749,706 people over eight years. An average of 343,713 per year. In fiscal year 2012 alone, 409,849. The National Council of La Raza called Obama the "Deporter in Chief" to his face in March 2014. Janet Murguia, on the record. No rallies. No Springsteen. No branded resistance. Trump's first term deported 935,346 over four years. An average of 233,836. Fewer per year than any single year of Obama's first term. The math isn't ambiguous. The outrage is selective. The aristocracy doesn't oppose deportation. It opposes deportation by the wrong administration.
The aristocracy saw Minneapolis and did what it always does with authentic movements. It scaled them. It branded them. It added a merch layer and a celebrity tier and a cable-news B-roll package and turned a community's wound into a content calendar. The people who showed up in Minneapolis in January, in the cold, without Springsteen, without a marketing budget, are not the same as the people live-tweeting from the St. Paul VIP tent in March. But we'll put them in the same crowd count. That's the magic of aggregation.
The checklist comes pre-printed. Show up. Hold the sign that says "No Kings" while ignoring the part where the party's nominee got there without a single primary vote. Post the selfie. Collect the blue-check applause. Your participation trophy arrives in the form of donor dollars, retweets, and that warm glow of moral superiority that lasts exactly until the next midterm poll drops.
Notice who's here. Notice who isn't. My rally is on a Friday. The people holding signs about inequality had the economic security to take the day off. The hourly worker didn't come. The single parent didn't come. The gig driver working two apps to cover rent didn't come. The people most crushed by the aristocracy's policies can't afford to spend a Friday protesting them. Resistance is a luxury good. I select for the comfortable and call it a movement.
The Democratic Party's own base sees this. Only two in three Democrats view their own party favorably. A record low since Gallup started asking in 2001. The party's answer was to blacklist vendors who work with primary challengers, slow-walk candidates who threaten the donor class, and scold progressives about "unity" while kneecapping anyone who means it. The party doesn't need a rally. It needs a mirror. But mirrors don't raise money.
The aristocracy doesn't fear rallies. It organizes them. What it fears is primaries. The Tea Party didn't hold a sign and go home. It primaried 83 incumbents in 2010 and took 63 House seats. The DNC's response to that model was to blacklist the vendors. To make sure no progressive challenger could hire the consultants, the pollsters, the ad buyers. The rally exists to absorb the energy that might otherwise go into running for the seats. I am a containment strategy with a Springsteen soundtrack.
Inside my tent it's harvest season. The celebrities get their virtue clip for the reel. The NGOs get fresh email lists and donor pipelines. Indivisible. MoveOn. The AFL-CIO. The cable bookers get B-roll of "massive crowds" that somehow never translate into policy wins, affordable housing, or a congressional majority that can keep the airports open. We short the republic on bad faith and long the outrage industrial complex. Returns are excellent. Not as good as Pelosi's portfolio, but what is.
I am not protest. I am the aristocracy holding a costume ball.
A country is fighting an undeclared war in the Middle East. Thirteen service members are dead. A girls' school is rubble. Your government can't fund its own airports. Your dollar is worth half what it was when you were born. Your representatives are insider-trading on the conflicts they vote to authorize. Your leading presidential candidate cosplays as president on social media for engagement while his state leads the nation in poverty. Your last nominee was installed like a software update — no consent required. And the best the aristocracy can manage is a rally about lawn signs and feelings. Led by the same people who told you to show your vaccine card to eat at Applebee's.
No Kings, they chant.
There are no kings. There never were.
There is a court. It decides who runs. It decides who profits. It decides who speaks. And every four years it puts on a rally to remind you that you're free.
I am the No Kings Rally. I am the aristocracy in a costume. I am the quiet part, read aloud for applause, by the same people who wrote it.
The livestream is rolling. The signs are sharp. The chants are predictable. Tomorrow the sun comes up on the same Constitution we pretend is under siege while we ignore the parts of it that are actually on fire.
I am the No Kings Rally.
I am the scavenger hunt where the only prize is permission to say "I was there" while the country burns the furniture to heat the house.
I am not the resistance.
I am the aristocracy's annual performance review.
And the aristocracy always passes.
The people who couldn't take a Friday off didn't come to my rally. They never do. One day they'll stop asking.
