No Kings, Just Courtiers

Prince Andrew loses a crown, Congress keeps its kneepads.

Good morning, and happy No Kings! day, that brief annual reminder that this country was supposed to be founded on the radical notion that no man should ever wield divine right over others. The Founders dumped tea into a harbor, fired a few warning shots at tyranny, and thought they’d settled the matter. Yet here we are, two and a half centuries later, watching a thin skinned, weak-minded, golden-haired monarch preside from the golf course while his courtiers in Congress genuflect and his shadow president sharpens the guillotine for democracy itself.

Across the Atlantic, the United Kingdom, yes, the monarchy, did something our vaunted republic refuses to do. It actually held one of its own accountable. Prince Andrew, formerly His Royal Highness, Duke of York, Air Miles Andy, has finally been stripped of his title. After years of denial, pizza alibis, and the kind of sweating-related medical fiction you only hear from men cornered by truth, Buckingham Palace has finally pried the ducal crown from his head. The man who once lectured the BBC on his inability to perspire now finds himself sweating in exile, titleless, friendless, and forever haunted by his Epstein connection.

In Washington, the Epstein files remain sealed tighter than a Mar-a-Lago safe. Congress, that mighty bulwark of checks and balances, has transformed into a body of professional enablers whose chief legislative purpose appears to be protecting Donald Trump’s criminal exposure. Where Britain stripped a prince, America shields a predator. The U.K. preserves its monarchy by exiling rot; the U.S. rots by pretending it’s still a democracy.

The moral inversion is so complete it could be a work of performance art. In the kingdom, the crown is humbled; in the republic, the emperor grows fatter on deference. The so-called “Epstein transparency” effort has been reduced to a bipartisan whisper campaign of excuses. Evidently, what’s fit for the royal family’s reckoning is far too dangerous for America’s elected one.

And while Congress hides behind “ongoing reviews,” it’s also refusing to vote on something else: war. The Venezuela Authorization Act, or as it’s known in shorthand, the “abdication clause”, remains frozen in committee because no one wants to go on record opposing Trump’s dream of a hemispheric war on “narco-terrorists.” Legislators who once boasted of defending the Constitution have discovered that obedience pays better than oversight. The Founders, if they could stop spinning long enough, might appreciate the efficiency: a self-dissolving legislature that declares its irrelevance in the name of patriotism.

Then comes the military subplot: Admiral Holsey, one of the few officers left who still believes the oath is to the Constitution, not to the man barking at clouds in the Oval Office. His resignation is the quiet sound of integrity, the rare act of conscience in a government that punishes it. Holsey left rather than salute a Pentagon turned political machine under Pete Hegseth’s chaos command, and the silence from his peers was deafening. Nothing says “strong military” like officers tiptoeing through the moral minefield, praying not to step on their own careers.

And looming over it all is Russell Vought, the unelected Rasputin of the Trump era. The “reaper” with the smile of a church deacon and the politics of Torquemada. Vought doesn’t want to lead the country; he wants to discipline it. The man openly brags about “traumatizing” civil servants, as though governance were an exorcism and he the holy hammer of austerity. His goal isn’t to serve the Constitution but to sanctify authoritarianism in evangelical packaging. “Christian nationalism,” he calls it, as if Jesus came down from the mount to deregulate the EPA and fire the NIH.

Trump may be the face, but Vought is the hand that moves the marionette. He sees democracy as an obstacle course, not a covenant. The self-described “shadow president,” he chairs Project 2025’s transition planning like a cleric preparing a coronation, executive orders pre-written, agency heads pre-fired, vengeance preordained. When Steve Bannon calls Trump an “instrument of the Lord,” you start to realize the Lord in question has a Cato Institute subscription and a taste for bloodletting.

In the land of hereditary monarchy, shame still carries weight. In the land of the free, shame is a partisan construct. Prince Andrew is dethroned for his friendship with Epstein; Donald Trump is deified for the same. Admirals resign in protest; senators resign themselves to irrelevance. And somewhere behind the velvet curtains of Project 2025, Russell Vought scribbles new commandments for a nation of loyal subjects who still insist they have no king.

Happy No Kings! Day, America.
The tea’s gone cold, the throne’s back up for rent, and the republic’s still pretending it can’t smell the rot. Marz and I are heading out for an early walk before today’s protest, the air feels thick with history, and maybe a little tear gas. Remember: stay peaceful, stay safe, and record everything.