Saturday’s No Kings rally in Boston was supposed to be a powerful display of grassroots resistance — a thunderous rebuke of President Trump by the enlightened masses. What it actually looked like, according to NBC 10’s own Sue O’Connell, was a gentle shuffle through the Boston Common by a sea of “Q-tips.”
Yes, her words — not mine.
In a moment of unexpected honesty from legacy media, O’Connell described the crowd as older, with “a lot of white hair,” and notably lacking in the youthful energy you’d expect from a movement supposedly surging with urgency. She even dropped the industry nickname — “Q-tips” — for the silver-haired protest class. Somewhere, a DNC intern just spilled their kombucha.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with older Americans speaking their minds. Many of them are the backbone of this country. But in this case, we’re not talking about the WWII generation marching to defend the Constitution. We’re talking about leftover Boomers from the New Left era — now dressed in protest-themed cardigans, reliving 1968 fantasies with slightly more arthritis and a lot less clarity.
This isn’t “a revolution.” It’s a reunion.
O’Connell went on to note that the protest was “peaceful and dressed up,” which is about as damning with faint praise as you can get. That’s code for: they wore themed outfits and politely yelled into the wind for a couple of hours before heading back to Whole Foods.
And the kicker? Even O’Connell couldn’t avoid mentioning the weird contradiction at the heart of it all — this protest, taking place on historic Boston Common, reeked of the “I hate America” vibe. That’s the through line for No Kings: a lot of noise about fascism and tyranny, but the message underneath is always the same — America is broken, freedom is fake, and Trump is the final nail in the coffin.
But here’s the thing: Boomer protest cosplay doesn’t resonate anymore. These folks came up in the ‘60s and haven’t updated their playbook since. The chants are the same. The slogans are the same. The outrage is the same. But the world? It’s moved on. And today’s problems — border security, inflation, crime, censorship, international chaos — can’t be solved by holding hands and singing about imagined kings.
The visual of aging activists in comfortable shoes, waving pre-printed signs in between sips from reusable water bottles, isn’t the image of resistance. It’s the image of a fading movement that lost the plot somewhere between COVID lockdowns and drag queen story hour.
So yes, the “No Kings” rally drew a crowd — but it wasn’t the youth uprising the left wants you to believe it was. It was the latest episode of Boomers Against Bad Vibes, a soft rebellion dressed in REI fleece and righteous indignation.
