No Kings: The Dangerous Lie That America’s President Was Meant to Be a Monarch
Brad O'Nishi dismantles the "No Kings" conspiracy theory, exposing how Christian nationalists like Michael Knowles and Harvard professor Adrian Vermeule falsely claim the U.S. presidency was designed as a monarchy based on Thomas Aquinas's theories. He details their push to replace democracy with authoritarian rule to enforce moral agendas, including banning abortion and repealing women's suffrage, while asserting the president remains a limited executive bound by the Constitution. Ultimately, O'Nishi argues that this narrative is a dangerous lie used to justify eroding democratic will, urging listeners to reject the idea of an unbound executive in favor of constitutional limits. [Automatically generated summary]
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad O'Nishi, author of American Caesar, How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America into a Monarchy.
Founder of Access Moody Media, co-host of this show.
This weekend, we have the No Kings protest.
Millions of Americans will protest in their neighborhoods, they're on their main streets, in the public square.
And no doubt, it will be a massive turnout.
It may be historic, and it will be a rebuttal to the idea that the United States has a king.
And it may seem obvious that having a king is the most un-American thing imaginable, but the American right doesn't see it that way.
The whole reason I wrote a book called American Caesar is because the idea of a monarch, an autocrat, a sole authoritarian ruler who can make decisions for everybody is not just a fringe idea for conspiracy theorists and incels and people on the far, far, far right.
It is a mainstream idea that has made its way to churches, theological centers, magazines, to places of political power.
Those who have the ability to advise our vice president.
They are tried and true monarchists.
So today I want to dig into one particular lie that you're going to hear over and over as we approach the 250th celebration of the United States on July 4th and as we protest the idea of a king this weekend.
Here's the lie.
You ready?
It's really simple.
The American president is really a king, a monarch, an unbound executive with near total control over the nation.
And that's what the founders wanted.
Now, that should sound like American blasphemy to your ears.
The opposite of the fundamental history and truth that we all learned in grade school when we discovered the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution.
But as I write in American Caesar, my book that is coming out in just a few months, and if you're interested, today, March 24th, March 25th, March 26th, you can get 25% off a pre-order for that book.
The link is in the show notes, and that is at Barnes ⁇ Noble.
So jump on it if you can and help me out.
As I show in the book, that lie is especially popular among Christian nationalists like C.J. Engel and Andrew Isker, William Wolf, people who called for a Red Caesar in the United States, people who want a Protestant Pinochet, people who want an American Franco.
They say this openly.
But today I want to focus on a recent set of statements by Michael Knowles, who's Catholic.
He is somebody who has risen to prominence as part of the right-wing media ecosystem.
He works with and for Ben Shapiro and has made his way into the kind of circuit of right-wing talking heads.
Well, he appeared recently at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast last week to tell us that the American founders created the president to be king of the United States.
Here's a summary.
Despite their anti-Catholic bias, the founders combined monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy in order to create the ideal form of governments according to Thomas Aquinas.
The president's more like a king than an executive head of a liberal democracy.
By recognizing that, we honor the founders' intentions and clear the path for renewal of the United States.
And that's beneficial because a king doesn't have to deliberate, negotiate, or work with others.
If you don't believe me, take a listen.
In the 250th anniversary, it's kind of funny that we're talking about Catholicism because the men who founded the country are rolling over in their graves at the very thought of that, including some of, despite my swarthy appearance, on my father's side, I am a wasp, and, you know, they would have disowned me for it.
But that doesn't really matter.
The fact is that the government that they established is very closely, if not identical, it's very closely in accord with the ideal regime laid out by St. Thomas in the Summa Theologiae and also in De Regno.
And he says the best regime is a regime that has a kingly aspect, a monarchical aspect, an aristocratic aspect, and a democratic aspect.
Now, I'm going to break down these statements because there's a lot there, but I want to focus in on this lie.
So I'm sure some of you are just screaming right now about Thomas Aquinas and the founders and all of that.
I'm with you.
But hang with me on the idea that the United States president is a king.
What does that lie do?
Why tell it?
What is the function of it?
It identifies monarchy as a built-in component to the American founding, thereby justifying rule by a single man.
A man who's often believed to have been chosen by God.
A man who will decide for everybody what is good, even if that hurts or kills or decimates or robs them in the process.
So let's start here.
Michael Knowles.
The fact is the government they established is close, if not identical to that that Thomas Aquinas laid out in the Summa Theologia and De Reño.
Now, this passes over, and I just have to stop here.
I'm not going to get lost, I promise.
But this passes over like centuries of debate about Thomas Aquinas and his understanding of the best form of government.
There are people who will tell you that Thomas Aquinas favored monarchy.
And you can find that in Thomas Aquinas.
I have read those quotes myself.
De Regno means on kingship.
It was written for a Cypriot king.
There are quotes in there where he talks about monarchy being favorable and efficient and the kind of government that will allow for quick decisions without clutter and negotiation, all that stuff that gets in the way when you have a democracy.
There's also places where Aquinas talks about a mixed form of government, and this follows on Aristotle.
What Aristotle and Aquinas really have in mind, and this is a really quick and dirty summary, is the idea of human flourishing.
And they see that as happening through different means.
But the thing to me that's important, and some of you are like, again, screaming, you can barely drive your car right now or get through washing the dishes because you're like so angry about what he's saying here.
I'm not going to spend an hour on that.
I'm sorry.
And if you want to chase down those links, go to the substack version of this post and see some of the links I put there.
But none of that matters to Knowles.
The fact that it's more complicated, the fact that it's not just a matter of like saying that this is exactly what Thomas Aquinas wanted and there's no question about it, no doubt, it doesn't matter.
That's not why he's saying it.
What he's doing is slipping in an element to the discourse that is really, really a Trojan horse.
He's saying that the executive branch of the United States government is a monarchy.
He's comparing the Senate to an oligarchy.
He's comparing the House to the democratic element of Thomas Aquinas' supposed ideal government.
He's saying that the United States president is a little king.
The president is the most powerful king on earth and has been for a very long time.
I think Professor Vermeule observed that the American president is the last monarch of the Ancien regime.
Now, there's another Trojan horse here.
He mentions Polybius and this idea of a good government is a government for the common good and bad government is government that is only for private interest.
Here's what he says.
In liberal modernity, we pretend that only democracy is legitimate.
Kim Jong-un was just re-elected with 99.93% of the vote two days ago.
So we really believe even the North Koreans have to be Democrats now.
But that isn't the real idea.
The real idea goes back to antiquity.
Polybius explains it well, which is that good government is government that is for the common good, and bad government is government that is only for private interest.
So you can have a good monarchy, a good aristocracy, a good democracy, and the bad versions are tyranny or oligarchy or mob rule.
Now, this is something you're going to hear over and over.
If you read my book, you will understand that this sentiment is very popular right now.
That what we should all be concerned with is the common good.
And we as Catholics, we as Christians, we as Protestants, we know what the common good is.
So you can have a good democracy or a good monarchy or good whatever, as long as it's mapping onto God's plan.
So if democracy doesn't map onto that plan, it's bad.
And as I talked about last week, maybe we just get rid of the democratic vessel and replace it with an authoritarian ship.
Because what really matters is the common good, not the will of the people.
Let me say that again.
What matters to these people is what they take to be good, the common good, not the will of the people.
Historically, democracy is rare.
For most of human history, rule by one person or a few people has been the standard.
This is why the United States has been an experiment.
It's an audacious attempt to share power and prevent monarchy or oligarchy from taking root.
There may have been benevolent kings in the past.
We can point to good kings.
If you watch a Disney movie, you will see the good king, the good queen, the good princess.
There may have been peaceful oligarchic regimes.
But in this moment in American history, when the president has dubbed himself a king, remember when Trump did that, when the top 1% own one-third of wealth and property, when billionaires surround the executive branch, when voting rights are under constant assault, such as in the Save America Act, Christian nationalists like Knowles offer lines like these with a clear purpose.
Democracy may be the problem, not the solution to our nation's ills.
In fact, we may need a king to fix it.
If the people are unruly, if they lack virtue, if they are just unwilling to listen to common sense, then democracy turns bad and we should replace it with a good monarchy.
This is justification for taking away your rights in order to impose their conception of good onto your body, way of life, and family.
So here's Knowles once again talking about the framers and Thomas Aquinas and the president as king.
So far, Knowles has done two things.
First, he's tried to convince you that our republic contains within it an element of monarchy.
Second, he tried to convince you that democracy may turn sour.
The implication is that if it does, we may need monarchy in order to move forward.
So he implanted the idea of monarchy into the federal government, and then he proceeds to say, well, we might, he imply at least that we might need monarchy to fix things.
And it's great because we already have it.
We have a president who's a little king, an ancient king, a remnant of a king.
So like, just let him be the king.
Let him fix everything.
And you're like, Brad, you might be reading too much into Knowles' statements.
I mean, is that really what's going on here?
But if you listen closely to that clip, he mentioned someone, a Harvard law professor named Adrian Vermuel, who's a Catholic convert, and he believes that the U.S. government should be integrated into the Catholic Church.
Let me say that again.
Adrian Vermuel, and I show this in my book definitively, there is no doubt about this.
He says it openly.
The United States government should be integrated into the Catholic Church.
He's what's called an integralist.
So when it comes to law in this country, Vermuel views the law as designed not to maximize individual autonomy or to minimize the abuse of power.
We don't have laws to protect you from the abuse of power by predatory agencies, corporations.
We don't have laws to make sure that people have maximum individual autonomy, like, I don't know, being able to vote without being threatened, being able to be a woman and get a job or not make less than your male counterpart, being a person of color, an indigenous person, an immigrant, and having the same standards as everyone else.
Nope, that's not what it does.
I explain in American Caesar that for Vermuel, law is about the common good.
It's about imposing the common good on everyone.
For him, democracy is disposable if and when it no longer serves the divine ordinance of reason.
If a different form of government, an autocracy or a non-representative model, can do better under this metric, imposing the common good, then it is preferred to one based on the will of the people.
This is about the common good versus the will of the people, and the common good is envisioned and outlined and imposed by Christian supremacists who think they know how you should live.
Vermuel wrote an infamous essay for The Atlantic called Beyond Originalism.
And in that essay, he makes the case that just authority and rulers can be exercised for the good of subjects if necessary, even against the subjects' own perceptions of what is best for them.
Abolishing Kings for Shared Power00:06:54
What that means is that he thinks as a ruler, you can impose the good even if people don't think it's good, even if it hurts, even if it seems bad or oppressive.
Many American citizens inevitably would protest this, stripping their rights in the name of a common good at a president turned into a Caesar.
I mean, people like Vermuel are open.
So is Knowles.
They want to abolish gay marriage, cease healthcare for trans people, place limits on divorce, ban pornography, abolish abortion.
They want to legislate morality according to Catholic natural law.
So what about those citizens who are displeased, having their rights taken away?
Maybe you can't get divorced.
Maybe, I don't know, we repeal the 19th Amendment and women can't vote.
What about them?
Well, Vermuel expects short-term dissatisfaction, but in the end, he trusts that all or most will come to understand that the government, in service of the church, knows what is best for them, even when they don't know what is best for themselves.
I quote him now.
Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly first experienced as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods.
Hey, you're going to thank me later.
I know this seems coercive right now.
I know it seems oppressive.
You're going to thank me later.
Me the king, me the Caesar.
The law must, and this is a quote, again, promote morality as a core and legitimate function of authority.
So if Americans can't behave themselves like good little boys and girls, then the church will have to punish them by way of law and policy with the help of the government run by a king.
Now, in my book, I break this down at length, but I'm going to offer a brief set of reflections here on why Knowles and Vermuel are misguided.
There is a place to start in history.
On historical grounds, it is just not true that the executive branch is a monarchy.
Let me say that again.
The executive branch is not a monarchy.
The president is not a king.
The founders debated how to structure our NASA government.
We could spend the next three hours going through the ways that they thought about maybe the president serving for life.
We could go through how in the beginning of the American Revolution, it was actually not the king who was really seen as the enemy of the colonies.
It was actually the parliament who had a chance to set the laws and the rules and the taxes that so irked them.
We could talk about the fact that England at the time was a monarchy, but it was one that had a parliament, and it was not necessarily an absolutist monarchy, and it wasn't as bad as it could have been.
That's all true.
But here's the thing: they decided in the end that monarchy would not suit the nation they envisioned.
I was much an enemy to monarchy before I came to Europe.
I am 10,000 times more so since I have seen what they are, Thomas Jefferson wrote to George Washington in 1788.
There is scarcely an evil known in these countries which may not be traced to their king as its source, nor a good which is not derived from the small fibers of republicanism existing among them.
There's a reason that they wanted to have a president and not a king.
And here's why.
Aliga Gold, who is a professor at the University of New Hampshire, explains this really well.
When Americans started debating what sort of government they wanted for the United States, they knew they needed an executive with some of the vigor that they associated with a monarchy.
What they had in mind, however, was different from the British crown.
The monarch, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Essays, was, quote, a perpetual magistrate who had the powers that were limited only by whatever rules he or she chose to observe.
Here's the problem with a king: they have powers.
That means they can choose which laws to observe.
They are limited only by their own volition, not the will of the people.
They are, by definition, above the law because they are the law.
Our president is different than that, at least supposedly.
Our president is a limited executive.
Here is a legal gold one more time.
The newly created role of U.S. president, by contrast, had clearly defined powers under the Constitution, as did Congress.
Crucially, the power to summon or to dismiss Congress belonged to the House of Representatives and the Senate, which together decided when to convene and when to adjourn.
The position of president, in other words, was intentionally designed without the authority to reproduce the 11-year tyranny of King Charles or the five-week suspension of Queen Elizabeth II and her current prime minister.
Those clearly defined powers, and this is me now, mean that the president is not a little king, an ancient king, or a remnant of the monarchy the founders rejected.
The president supposedly is bound by the rule of law, just like the rest of us, and leads with shared powers among the other branches of government.
But the likes of Knowles and Vermeule want you to think otherwise.
They want you to think that the country might just need a king in order to get the unruly women in line, to spank the misbehaving children, and generally set the house in order.
They want you to think that democracy is an option or a problem, not a sacred attempt to thwart the rule of the one or the few.
They want to impose on you their vision of good.
Why?
To take away your rights in the name of their vision of freedom, order, and beauty.
They don't think your life is wondrous, vibrant, or full of love.
They don't think that your family is beautiful.
They don't think that the choices you make should be respected.
They don't think that our laws should protect us from predators, from monopolies, from unfair prejudice against those who are racial or ethnic minorities, those who are gender, who have gender and sexual identities that make them minorities.
Those folks who are historically left out of representation and equality in the United States, no.
The law exists to impose on you their understanding of family, their understanding of good, their understanding of gender, their understanding of beauty.
And that is why, my friends, we say it.
No kings.
No Kings: Ever00:03:54
Not today.
Not ever.
We don't have a king.
We don't have somebody who is the law.
We don't have somebody who's above the law.
We don't have somebody who gets to stay in power forever or as long as they wish.
We have a president who shares power.
The president, he or she may be the lead.
They may be the face.
They may have more decision power than everyone else.
But that is not absolute power.
That is not power above the law.
And that's why we say it.
No kings.
Not today.
Not ever.
We the people, united, will not be defeated, even when Christian supremacists, authoritarians, or wannabe Caesars try to tell us what is good for us.
All right, y'all, I need you to do three things for me today.
I need you to think about buying American Caesar.
It's 25% off March 24, March 25, March 26.
That would really help me.
I know you get a lot of pleas to buy books and subscribe and do stuff, but unfortunately in the publishing industry, a lot of great books are books you never hear of, and that's because publishers and advertisers, they don't think they're going to be popular enough to put in front of you.
You don't see them at the airport.
You don't see them on your social media feed.
You don't see them at your bookstore.
Well, what really makes that happen is pre-orders.
When a book has a lot of pre-orders, the publisher and the media and the industry is like, okay, this is a book we need to kind of get out there.
And so, if you want to, if you have ever wondered how to support me, this is what I'm asking for today.
I need you to subscribe to our newsletter.
We send that out every Sunday.
We're on Substack, and we just have so much info in there.
We have places you can connect with us in a week on March 31st.
We're going to have our next bonus episode for subscribers at 7:15 Eastern.
And we're going to be talking about Larry, Larry, Louie.
We're going to talk about Louis Theroux into the Manosphere.
And so, Dan and I will be digging into that.
Dan will be doing office hours and Discord like he does every month.
We've got events coming up and a lot you don't want to miss.
So, subscribe to our newsletter.
And then, I need you to be aware that we have a new show coming on Access Moody Media.
And that show is called One Million Neighbors.
And it's about something that happened that you've probably never heard of.
The 1970s, a group of people who, a lot of them, were Christian, but not exclusively, did something impossible.
They helped to resettle 1 million refugees from Southeast Asia.
And one of the most important places in that movement was the Twin Cities.
A lot of the folks that you saw in the Twin Cities resisting and organizing were people who had learned from the generation before them who had fought to help resettle refugees from Laos and Cambodia and Vietnam.
Tong Lai Tao, Chong Lai Tao, excuse me, the man who was dragged out of his home in his underwear, was a refugee from Southeast Asia.
So, I'm going to play the trailer for you today.
And I want you to go and subscribe to the show and support it because it's going to teach you lessons about what could be in this country.
And it's also going to teach you lessons about those who organized in years previous to set the ground for the resistance that we saw in the Twin Cities over the last couple of months.
I'm Brad O'Nishi.
Thanks for being here today, y'all.
Appreciate your support.
I'm so thankful to get to do this with you every week.
I hope you'll subscribe.
I hope you'll tell someone about the show.
I hope you'll find us on YouTube.
We'll be back tomorrow with its In the Code and Friday with the weekly roundup.