Just an FYI to the “No Kings” Democrats: you don’t get to blather to us about “No Kings” while calling for the disarmament of a population under military occupation. The people running these demonstrations seem too historically illiterate to remember that the American Revolution was a war, and that it got rid of the King by killing his troops.

If this isn’t your cup of tea, your opposition to kings only goes so far. “No Kings Until the Gunfire Begins” is not “No Kings.” If you’ve never been shot at, and never longed to shoot back, you don’t understand what “No Kings” really means. And if your response to those who do shoot back is to disarm them, you’re a closet exponent of absolute monarchy masquerading as an anti-monarchist, not a democrat, much less a revolutionary. If you don’t want me to say this at your little Democratic coffee klatch, don’t invite me. Better yet, learn some history and figure out why I’d say it. 

The Democrats have only one card to play: they’re not Trump. Call it the anti-Trump trump card. They know that they only have to mouth a few vapid slogans, and advocate for a few better-than-Trump policies that they either can’t deliver or won’t. The hope is that people will swallow their pride, choose the “lesser evil,” and vote Democratic. That’s their whole scam.

Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in New Jersey, has now taken to bragging that she’s the only one of the candidates who’s actually deported anyone. In other words, her humble brag is that she can out-do the Right at their own game. This is a person who opposes the Immigrant Trust Act, and has played a few weeks of rhetorical games over whether she supports the Immigrant Trust Directive. Getting her to talk about migrant rights at all is like pulling teeth.

Sherill regards herself as pro-migrant, and is mysteriously regarded that way by Democrats, because she insists, fecklessly, that she’ll demand that ICE take their masks off while doing exactly what they’ve wanted to do all along, and what she herself will facilitate. Once their masks are off, will we be able to dox them? No answer. Will we be able to hold them to account? No answer. Will the enforcement decrease or intensify? Probably intensify. So the victory here is that we’ll get more raids with more guns being pointed in our faces, but at least the disarmed victims will see the whites of their eyes and the hair in their nostrils. Sounds great. “No Kings Except Pyrrhus.”

The mask ban is in any case an empty boast, and Sherrill knows it. Once she courts the Right to get elected, she loses any electoral support for constraints on ICE. She gets to trundle this mask shit on the campaign trail precisely because she knows she’ll never have to deliver once she gets to the governor’s residence. Fall for it if you like, but it’s not serious, and it’s not a strategy.

Sherrill’s signature issue, she never tires of telling us, is transportation. She wants to build new transportation infrastructure for New Jersey.

Who the fuck does she think is going to build it? Forty percent of construction workers in New Jersey are foreign born, and between 17% and 28% of the labor force in construction is estimated to be undocumented. State-level data indicates that undocumented migrants make up about 7.6% of New Jersey’s total workforce.

So Sherrill’s vaunted state infrastructure projects are like an engraved invitation for ICE raids: construction sites are where the migrants are. How helpful is it to decline support on the ITD, refuse support on the ITA, but then tell us that we need a mask ban? The British Army didn’t need masks to occupy Boston. Why would ICE need masks to occupy us? Sherrill is pathetically proud to have deported all those migrants as a federal prosecutor. Well, it looks like she’s going to deport a bunch more as governor, assuming she gets elected–the very ones building her vaunted infrastructure projects. This is literally a fascism of making the trains run on time, except that the primary victims will be the people building the train tracks. 

Meanwhile, the in-house Democratic intelligentsia–from Mark Lilla to Ezra Klein–is telling us that the only way to win is to invite anti-abortion candidates into the party, the better to destroy the last remnant of an excuse for voting Democratic. These are the frauds that the Democrats are touting while they wave the “No Kings” banner in our faces. “No Honesty or Integrity” is a better description of who they are. “How you gonna win if you ain’t right within?” as Lauryn Hill aptly asks. You ain’t, is the answer. There’s no winning by their methods, just progressive defeat by spitting in the faces of anyone who demands action on principle.

It’s not a winning strategy because they’re not a winning party. The Democrats are the ostensive definition of losers. People should stop falling for their tired blackmail tactic of demanding votes to avoid a fate worse than them. This is to blame us for their defects. Trump is in office through their defaults and vices. We can’t free ourselves of the MAGA phenomenon by catering to those vices, nurturing them, and hoping for the best. The “audacity of hope” has become the effrontery of fideism. It’s time to see that blind faith is culpable ignorance, not a route out of darkness, and not a revolt against tyranny.