By Curmudgeon
Listen, I’ve been around these high-country ridges long enough to know when somebody’s trying to serve up leftover Rocky Mountain Oysters and call it prime rib.
The “No Kings” protesters marching through Salida are acting like they’ve uncovered some brave new stand against tyranny. But peel back the signs and slogans, and it’s nothing more than a demand to reload the exact same policy menu that American voters examined, lived through, and firmly rejected in November 2024.
Those failures are still fresh enough to sting. We don’t need dusty history books. We just need to remember the empty wallets, the chaotic news cycles, and the uncomfortable school board meetings from the last four years.
They want us to “halt aggressive immigration enforcement.” That’s code for returning to the catch-and-release approach and lax border policies that produced record encounters, surging fentanyl deaths, and overwhelmed communities. We tried it. Voters said no.
They demand we “protect and expand healthcare access” along with expansive abortion rights. We did that experiment too. Premiums remained stubborn, and here in Colorado we now permit the abortion of healthy nine-month fetuses right up to delivery for virtually any reason. What began as “safe, legal, and rare” quietly morphed into the stuff of nightmares.
On the environmental front, they push for the same aggressive climate mandates and regulations we saw before. We lived through the spending bills, the EPA rules, and the resulting pinch on energy and grocery prices. Voters chose a different path.
In education, they want to shield the previous status quo from any meaningful change. That’s the same road that delivered falling test scores, learning loss, and parents feeling shut out of their own children’s schooling. We tried it. We voted against it.
And on “protecting LGBTQ+ rights,” what started as basic tolerance has morphed into puberty blockers, hormones, and social and sometimes surgical transitions for children as young as twelve, at times kept secret from parents. Give an inch on compassion, and the activists rarely stop there. They keep pushing until the majority finally draws a line. Then they push some more.
That’s the core problem with these recycled demands. You cannot allow even minor incursions into these cultural and policy arenas, because the organizers never settle for moderation. They stretch every compromise until it reaches extremes that ordinary people never signed up for. One small step on “inclusion” becomes irreversible medical interventions on minors. One “humane” tweak at the border becomes sustained chaos, financed with your tax dollars. They test the limits until the public pushes back.
The No Kings movement offers no fresh vision, no honest accounting of what went wrong last time, and no willingness to learn from the electorate’s clear verdict. Instead, they treat voters as if we have the memory of a mayfly and simply want to reboot the same rejected package: border disorder, inflation pressure, cultural overreach on kids, and selective outrage over wars.
Around here in the high country we still put stock in learning from hard experience rather than repeating it. We’ve seen enough late-spring snowstorms to understand you don’t keep heading into the same drift expecting the road to clear itself this time.
If there’s one good thing to say about No Kings, it’s that they’ve at least shown up and exercised their right to assemble. In a free country, that still counts for something. But showing up isn’t the same as offering better ideas.
Passion without reflection is just noise.
The folks driving this effort owe the rest of us a dose of plain honesty. Own the past failures. Learn something from the 2024 verdict. Stop pretending the last four years were something the majority want to relive. Because if we let them drag us backward into the same discarded policies, the real casualty won’t be some abstract notion of democracy. It’ll be the practical common sense and neighborly goodwill that still binds our mountain communities together.
And that, friends, is a price too steep to pay.
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