The Naysayers’ Society Quarterly Circular
On the Current Administration and the Fashion for No Kings
The Naysayers’ Society Quarterly Circular
Vol. CCXII, No. 0 — Issued under Reluctant Protest
“No, and furthermore, No.”
On the Current Administration and the Fashion for No Kings
We of the Naysayers’ Society, who have survived monarchs, mobs, ideologues, and influencers, not to mention wars, plagues, famines, earthquakes, the rise and fall of empires, find ourselves once again compelled - against our better judgment - to address the present debacle of governance unfolding in the American theater.
The current administration, whose talent for spectacle surpasses its capacity for thought, has mistaken performance for policy, slogans for substance, and manipulated and cherry picked public sentiment as if truth. Its ministers of messaging trumpet each contradictory, self destructive nincompoopery as innovation, while the citizenry, caught between exhaustion and addiction, scrolls through the chaos in a failed quest for reassurance that their world isn’t collapsing into ruin before their eyes.
Were we less skeptical, we might call this chaos tyranny. But tyranny requires conviction, and conviction has long since been outsourced to algorithms.
As for the “No Kings” protests now filling the squares and feeds—ah, how the pendulum swings! Once we scorned the divine right of kings; now we endure the divine right of crowds. Both claim infallibility, both bristle at criticism, and both eventually crown their own idols. The chant of “No Kings” would be noble if it were not so quickly followed by “But make me one.”
We sympathize, of course, with any movement that rejects blind authority. Yet we cannot help noticing that the rebels have learned their manners from the very monarchs they denounce: grand gestures, ritual outrage, and a royal disdain for doubt. In their haste to dethrone the powerful, they have forgotten that power regenerates precisely where certainty is loudest.
Let us state, for the record, what every sober mind already knows:
There can be no republic without refusal.
No freedom without the right to doubt it.
We are not revolutionaries, nor royalists, nor nihilists. We are the quiet custodians of contradiction, the necessary discomfort in every age drunk on its own virtue. We ask no followers, demand no purity, and erect no statues. Our only decree is vigilance—directed first inward.
The Naysayers’ Society therefore extends its reluctant commendation to Her Majesty Queen Agnes of Elsewhere, whose declaration that “cynicism and skepticism are signs of vigilance every citizen must apply to themselves” has been misquoted, misunderstood, and therefore - by our measure - utterly perfect.
To the administration: govern, if you are capable, but spare us the moral pageantry as you go about immoral actions.
To the protestors: resist, but leave room for laughter and self-doubt (as many are).
To the citizen: practice sovereignty within before shouting for it without. Freedom is a lot of work and many are lazy.
And to all: remember that disbelief, properly exercised, is the truest act of faith remaining.
—The Committee of Persistent and Ongoing Dissent since 1729
Fleet Street, revived in digital exile, Year Three of the Reign of Elsewhere
The Naysayers Society is a marginally approved subsidiary of the International Post Dogmatist Group. Standard disclaimer invoked. Be peaceful out there.
