The party that screams ‘No Kings’ just gave Charles III a standing ovation | Opinion

Picture the scene. It is a glorious spring morning in Washington, D.C., King Charles III and Queen Camilla descend the steps of the British Embassy lawn in a blaze of pageantry, gun salutes echoing across the Potomac. In Congress, Democrats who spent the past month organizing “No Kings” rallies across the country rose to their feet and gave a hereditary monarch a standing ovation.

A month earlier SLO Dems were out on the streets again demanding “No Kings.”

Consistency, it seems, is for those with principles.

All it takes to turn a protest movement into a swooning fan club is a hereditary monarch saying sensible things about democratic norms in a rather nice, plummy accent. The irony is positively dripping.

I am a republican with a small ‘r.’ Hereditary power and wealth is just nepotism with a crown on.

That said, I thought Charles’ address was commendable. The rare bipartisan standing ovation well-earned. However, if the most coherent voice for democratic values in America’s current political moment is a hereditary ruler who was never elected to anything, we have a problem.

Two peas in a gilded pod

Before the left gets too giddy over its new royal crush, a brief reality check. King Charles III is, by almost any measure that progressives claim to care about, a man who should send their outrage meters into meltdown.

He inherited his position, his palaces and a fortune estimated at over $2 billion. Most of it plundered originally from the poor and weak and today largely shielded from inheritance tax. He owns racehorses, multiple estates and a stamp collection worth $125 million. Nearly double the entire GDP of Tuvalu, a small Pacific nation that just voted to become a republic, having read the same memo America wrote in 1776.

He reportedly travels with his own custom toilet seat. A former valet once revealed that the royal bath must be precisely half full, at exactly the right temperature, with the plug positioned “just so.” When standards slipped, everybody was scolded.

His temper is well documented. Biographer Christopher Andersen recorded that Charles once threw a chair through a stuck window at a friend’s country house, then smashed a second window for good measure. At Highgrove, he berated his gardening staff through a green megaphone. One former staffer told Andersen: “For someone who said he was bullied as a child, Prince Charles clearly enjoyed bullying us. At his accession ceremony, a leaking pen prompted a royal meltdown caught on camera. “I can’t bear this bloody thing,” he told aides.

He was unfaithful to his first wife. Then he married the other woman.

Sound familiar?

A thin-skinned billionaire who inherited his wealth, mistreated staff, cheated on his wife, abuses power and shouts at subordinates is called a fascist when his name is President Trump. When his name is King Charles, he gets a standing ovation.

The point is not that Charles is a bad man. He has done genuine good through his charity The Prince’s Trust (now The King’s Trust) and decades of environmental advocacy.

The point is that the “No Kings” crowd is applying its preferences, rather than its principles.

The new royals

Meanwhile, in New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani turned out to meet the king.

This requires a moment’s pause. Mamdani has spent his political career blaming the Crown for everything that went wrong in Uganda, while giving Idi Amin, the homicidal dictator who actually expelled Uganda’s South Asian community in 1972, a complete pass.

Before greeting Charles at the 9/11 Memorial, he announced he would urge the king to return the Koh-i-Noor, a 105.6-carat diamond taken from India in 1849. A bold opening gambit. He then shook the king’s hand and smiled for the cameras. The son of a celebrated film director and a distinguished academic, Mamdani is not exactly the dispossessed colonial subject his politics imply. The revolution, as ever, was postponed for the photo op.

Unlike Mamdani’s, Charles’ words to Congress were thoughtful and non-partisan, which is precisely why they landed. He refused, in the most genteel way imaginable, to be weaponized.

But let us not confuse a dignified speech with a democratic argument. Charles III did not earn his platform. He inherited it. Every word he spoke, however wise, was amplified by an institution built on exactly the hereditary principle the Declaration of Independence rejected 250 years ago.

When the clearest voice for democratic norms in the room belongs to someone who inherited the right to speak, the room has a problem. You cannot scream “No Kings” on a Saturday and swoon over one on a Tuesday.

Pick a lane. Otherwise, your protestations aren’t worth the placards they’re written on.

Clive Pinder hosts “CeaseFire” on KVEC 920AM/96.5 FM and writes at clivepinder.substack.com. He is a republican, with a small r, and equally allergic to all crowns and hypocrisy.