No Kings - Except Moloch And Marx And Everyone Else

Authored by Anthony Esolen via American Greatness,

No kings? But millions of little queens of both sexes, tyrants in both public and private life, who would make sure, if they were in the position to do so, that I would pay dearly for the very sentence I am writing right now; who police both what you say and what you would very much like to be left alone not to say; who use exceptional cases to justify surveillance over people who teach their children at home, and who agitate to make that choice more difficult if not illegal; who have in fact made it illegal, by the agency of the national government, for people to refrain, without suffering a stiff financial penalty, from buying health insurance which they may not need or want.

No kings, but millions of people dancing with glee at the assassination of Charlie Kirk and hoping that that’ll teach those rednecks from getting uppity; headsmen glad to lop off inconvenient lives at their beginning, exercising total and tyrannical power against the most vulnerable, whose very existence is owing to the voluntary actions of those who would slay them; shedding crocodilian tears of sympathy if someone who is sad and lonely at any age decides to end his life, corralling a doctor or nurse to assist in suicide, and thus corrupting the profession; eager to embroil the nation in a war with Russia, yet crying out in rage at the prospect that Cuba and Venezuela might now have the chance to pick themselves up out of their socialist miseries; no kings but Moloch and Marx.

No kings, but fantasy queens, all the touchier and more vindictive if anyone should laugh at the fantasy, or even say, hat in hand, scraping and ducking, that maybe, well, maybe, the fantasy isn’t real; wrenching the very definition of marriage away from common law and common sense; glad to compel girls to compete against mentally ill boys in sports, and even gladder to have them invade their locker rooms; continuing, with all the might and weight of schools, colleges, and the media, to thrust upon a still-hesitating populace one experiment after another against sexual reality and against the most reliable means for climbing out of poverty, the family; no king and queen but Baal and Astarte.

No kings, but people with the souls, though not the courage, of tyrants, who, if someone in a favored group is murdered or is alleged to have been murdered by a policeman, will organize en masse to shut down your city, vandalize businesses that get in their way, and block traffic on major highways, stranding ambulances and the desperate people they are carrying, and who will in general carry on so as to make a fair trial impossible; people, including some who hold political office, who issue open threats to judges, demanding the judgment they approve and saying that they will pay for it if they judge otherwise; no kings, but wannabe dictators everywhere, armed with organizational money and power, going after an ordinary fellow with a bakery, making a federal case of it if he declines politely to contribute his efforts toward the celebration of perversion.

No kings, no kings, but people eager to suppress the native population by conniving at the non-enforcement of immigration laws, laws duly passed by the people’s own representatives in Congress; no kings, but people content to make it trivially easy to cast a vote by mail, which you are not authorized to cast; no kings, but people who hate the less populous states and would overwhelm them with the might of numbers, by eliminating one of their few frail signs and guardians of autonomy, the Electoral College.

No kings, whose appetites for wealth were kept in check in old times by the charters they gave to townsmen and their merchants and who could only take what actually existed, but grubby politicians ready to tax notional wealth, which does not even exist but only might exist, wealth not even on paper but floating in the air of suppositions; no kings, but despisers of intergenerational family wealth, ready to soak up all your assets when you die, on the grounds that every generation should begin from scratch, that it is not “fair” for your children to inherit what you have worked so hard to give them after you are gone; no kings, but Jabba the State.

No kings, but NGOs everywhere, with vast resources in wealth and no legal directives or oversight as to how it is spent, and spent not in charity but in political action, orchestrating demonstrations; no kings, but a million verminous thought-controllers in high technology, invisibly promoting or suppressing what they wish, via the algorithms that would govern our collective thoughts; no kings, but Google, and its court jester Disney.

No kings, but schoolteachers and principals who think it is all right to do with a large classroom of boys and girls what would get the creepy man down the street arrested if he did exactly the same thing with but one; no kings, but people who bar the door against parents who want to find out what is going on in school behind them; no kings, but Kinsey set free from all restraint.

No kings, but a tangle of human resource personnel, lawyers, judges, and political interest groups ranged against you if you attempted to hire a Thomas Edison without formal schooling, thus driving up the costs of higher schooling and higher indoctrination, saddling families with exorbitant debt while providing, in return, very little in the way of a truly human education.

No kings, but haters of religion and people of religious faith, the main obstacle to their power, as the family is the fundamental social unit of possible opposition to the ambitions of the non-religious and their aims to mold the minds of other people’s children, especially since they have rather few of their own; no kings but the murderous and atheistical Mao Zedong and his even crueler wife Jiang Qing; Charlemagne, no, Confucius, hell no, but Mao, yes; Washington, no, but Castro, yes.

No kings, no one to join with the middle class in a flanking action against innumerable rapacious aristocrats; insulation for the exercisers of real political and economic power, whatever they happen to call themselves, but exposure of everyone else; no kings from one horizon to the other, but you will hit a duke or duchess wherever you spit, and God help you when you do.

No kings, but politicians and their wealthy or addle-pated enablers, who would, to “save the planet,” compel everyone to draw their power from centralized electrical grids, even the power to travel by car from Mayfield to Springfield; no kings, then, but controllers of artificially established turnpikes, bottlenecks, and checkpoints, with the power to bring an entire nation to its knees; no kings, but a new kind of Andrew Carnegie with ten thousand times the power and none of the bracing experiences of hard manual labor.

No kings, but censors in everyone’s hair, like lice, not to police public morals and keep obscenity from the eyes of children, but to police people who object to the obscenity; Cato everywhere, on the lookout for demands for decency, to punish those who dare to demand it.

No kings, not even God Almighty, but everyone to be a king or a queen only in those matters that enervate and corrupt; free to be weaklings, slaves, louts, and harlots, all true self-reliance lost, along with the nobility of the divine image; “Non serviam,” cries the slave as he submits his hands to the state, ready to clap them in irons; no king but the Self, and the driver of the Self without God, a driver sometimes called Satan.

No kings indeed.