10 Musings on No Kings Day

Ozymandias

My entire life has been about justice. The word itself sits inside my name. Justin is derived from the Latin justus, which means righteous, lawful, just. This is not a belief I adopted. It was assigned before I understood its weight. It was how I knew at a very early age that much of the American experiment was built on the backs and bodies of Native Americans, the enslaved, immigrants, and women. It was how I knew that evils like fascism and communism are an extension of the collective ego; thus, we must always be vigilant of their influence.

Justice, for me, is not theory or debate. It is the architecture of power aligned toward dignity. It is design, not sentiment. It is the ground I am responsible for holding. It shapes how I read history, power, and systems.

No Kings Day is not just a nationwide (and worldwide) protest. It’s certainly not a political party stunt. It’s a necessary confrontation with the patterns that keep replicating themselves in this country. The rejection of monarchy was never simply about rejecting hereditary crowns. It was about resisting concentrated, unaccountable power in any form. Kingship is not identified by crowns but by asymmetry, by the power to extract without consequence, rule without consent, and bend moral authority to serve wealth and hierarchy.

The American experiment began with an explicit refusal to be ruled by kings. And yet, kings have returned in modern dress: corporate monopolies, captured courts, performative religion, financial aristocracy, legislative sabotage, and state-backed surveillance, and most of all, the latest iteration of Ozymandias.

These are my ten meditations for this moment:

1. Immigration Reveals the Original Argument

Immigrants today carry the same hunger that ignited 1776. They seek to build, to work, and to raise their families free from arbitrary rule. The energy behind their migration reflects the founding rejection of distant, oppressive authorities. Hostility toward immigrants has little to do with legality or borders; it functions to protect inherited privilege. MAGA defends not a nation, but a hierarchy—one that mirrors the very monarchy the American Revolution sought to overthrow. It functions as a modern extension of the Crown's obsession with control, extraction, and the divine right to rule, now enforced through cultural grievance and economic consolidation.

2. Property Obsession Masks Constitutional Decay

The fixation on property destruction often operates as a decoy. Broken windows draw more outrage than broken elections. Looted stores evoke more public grief than dismantled civil rights. Property is replaceable. Constitutional architecture, once compromised, corrodes the entire system. The disproportionate public response to property damage reflects a culture trained to defend comfort rather than examine power.

3. Accountability Is a Bitch

It is time to treat this administration and its enablers exactly as they treat the people they target. Assume they are criminals. Assume they do not belong here. Demand their papers. Assume they are a threat to bodily autonomy, both in choice and safety. Decide their future for them. Assume they endanger children, that their existence distorts the moral fabric of the nation. This is not satire. This is not political theater. This is clarity. They have absorbed the labels of traitor, fascist, and Christian nationalist without flinching. They wear these accusations as banners. The benefit of the doubt serves no function. Extend no grace where none exists. And when they demand mercy, answer with John 7:24: “Judge with righteous judgment.”

4. Empire Christianity Is Re-Crucifies Jesus

The fusion of Christian language with empire functions as a state-sponsored religion that mirrors the old monarchy the founders rejected. This is not a misunderstanding of Jesus; it is a replacement of him. Jesus' life confronted religious corruption, economic exploitation, and imperial rule, the machinery that always sustains kings. Empire Christianity now sanctifies state violence, corporate extraction, and legislative oppression, offering religious cover to the very powers Jesus defied. Nowhere is this more visible than in the state-backed targeting of Queer people, whose bodies and identities are marked as threats to the empire's fragile moral order.

5. Insecurity Should Never Become Policy

Sadly, the function of privilege is often to translate personal discomfort into state policy and codified hierarchy. Fear of demographic change becomes immigration bans designed to preserve cultural dominance. Discomfort with identity diversity becomes rigid controls over gender, family, and reproductive autonomy. Anxiety about dissent transforms into systematic suppression of speech, protest, and access to the ballot. These fears require durable mechanisms to sustain them. Law becomes the scaffolding that converts private bias into public governance, ensuring that the personal insecurities of the powerful are enforced as the moral order of the state.

6. The Selective Application of Resistance

The Second Amendment has been sold as the sacred hedge against tyranny, the final safeguard against kings. Yet when executive overreach, judicial capture, and legislative sabotage emerge as modern forms of monarchy, the self-proclaimed guardians of liberty fall silent. Their weapons do not challenge the throne; they serve it. The guns exist not for resisting power, but for defending hierarchies that crumble under shared authority. The hypocrisy is structural. They invoke rebellion while pledging loyalty to their chosen king.

7. The Delusion of the Populist King

Trump embodies the modern monarch precisely because so many refuse to see him as one. The delusion rests in the belief that his performance of grievance makes him anti-elite. His alliances remain with billionaires, hedge funds, fossil fuel barons, and media conglomerates. His wealth and power circulate among the same aristocrats who control the machinery of the state. The illusion of populism conceals the restoration of monarchy, a king who convinces the people they have chosen him, while serving the very oligarchs who write the rules.

8. The Authoritarian Impulse Transcends Ideology

Authoritarianism operates wherever power fears accountability. The right builds authoritarian structures through nationalism, religious control, and corporate loyalty. The left builds its own versions through rigid speech codes, purity tests, and ideological gatekeeping. Both reduce human dignity to conformity. Liberation demands intellectual risk, moral humility, and the ability to hold conviction without demanding uniformity. Control always reveals itself, whether dressed in tradition or disguised as progressive virtue.

9. Apathy Crowns New Kings

Power expands through fatigue, ambiguity, and the false comfort of moderation. Negotiating with authoritarian structures allows monarchy to reassert itself under new banners. Neutrality does not restrain kingship; it offers it the throne. The refusal to confront concentrated power becomes complicity in its reign. The ones who seek compromise with kings rarely shape history. Conviction dethrones monarchs. Apathy hands them the crown.

10. Replacing MAGA is the Next Great Enterprise

The most valuable work ahead belongs to entrepreneurs who reject the old hierarchies that keep rebuilding kings. No Kings philosophy demands more than resistance; it requires construction. Entrepreneurs hold the unique position to architect parallel systems that loosen the grip of extraction, manipulation, and authoritarian consolidation. The next generation of enterprise will not simply produce new products; it will replace corrupted institutions. Supply chains designed for stewardship over exploitation. Financial systems that circulate capital instead of concentrating it. Platforms that elevate dialogue rather than weaponize algorithms. Education that equips rather than indoctrinates. Communities organized around shared ownership, mutual accountability, and distributed authority.

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The work of justice now requires discipline in how the fight is waged. This is not reaction. This is strategy. This is a battle for systemic alignment, not personal catharsis.

• Invite debate, but never surrender authority.

• Study their systems of control: courts, markets, media, religion.

• Master the language they distort; sharpen your rhetoric with precision.

• Choose timing and battlegrounds that serve the larger repair, not emotional impulse.

• Guard your body, your mind, and your spirit as assets under constant pressure.

• Stand your ground without adopting their tactics of distortion and rage.

• Speak truthfully and simply when they complicate to confuse.

• Maintain dignity where they bait for degradation.

• Apply judgment with clarity and sobriety where they demand deference to false power.

This is how the fight is waged. This is systemic repair. This is institutional reconstruction.

For me, my name remains my reminder: The work is justice.