June 14: America on Parade—and on Edge June 14 brought flags, parades, protests, a fake senator scuffle, a political shooting, and Iran’s unraveling—all under the shadow of Trump’s birthday. By Roger Kimball
https://amgreatness.com/2025/06/15/june-14-america-on-parade-and-on-edge/
I write on June 14, a full-docket news day. You’ll have heard some of the news. For one thing, June 14 is Flag Day in the United States, an opportunity to rally ’round and ponder the significance of its history and iconography. After all, “the Stars and Stripes” is not merely a heraldic description: it is also a distillation or epitome of a sentiment, a world view, and a political achievement.
June 14 is also the birthday of Donald Trump, the President of the United States. Given his celebration of an “America First” MAGA political program, it seems more than coincidental that he should share his birthday with a national holiday called “Flag Day.”
Ditto the fact that June 14 was the date of Trump’s big military parade in Washington. The date was chosen to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the establishment of the United States Army. Sclerotic legacy outlets like The Atlantic (“The Shame of Trump’s Parade”) and The New York Times are throwing one of their signature snits about the parade. It’s just like military displays in the Soviet Union and other authoritarian states, they say.
I take the opposite view. I think the parade is both a salutary celebration of the army and a condign expression of American national pride. As the commentator Irving Kristol put it in the 1990s, “There is nothing like a parade to elicit the proper respect for the military from the populace.” I agree.
Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, I note that June 14 was also the day on which some 2000 protests were scheduled to unfold across the nation. What were they protesting? The official title was “No Kings.” The protesters, you see, were claiming that Donald Trump was acting like a king by deploying the police power of the state to deport illegal aliens and to protect the immigration officials tasked with the job. Were the organizers harkening back to the origins of the Roman Republic in 509 BC when Brutus, avenging the death of Lucretia, declared that never again would Rome be ruled by a king? Maybe. It’s possible.
Probably not. In the event, the protests seem to have attracted a motley crew of aging boomers, paid professional protesters, disaffected academics, and confused teenagers. Several of the protests in Florida and elsewhere have been cancelled because of lack of interest.
But one clever observer, noting that the ex-Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, she of Anthony Weiner, and Alex Soros, spawn of George, were married today at a fancy mansion in the Hamptons, had the appropriate response to this shameless exhibition of our secular royalty: “No Kings.”
We may now move briefly from the ridiculous to the pathetic. I mean the little melodrama involving Alex Padilla, the grandstanding Democrat senator from California, who thrilled the left-wing media when he managed to get himself tackled and handcuffed by the Secret Service when he disrupted a press conference held by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. “Oh my God, Trump’s thugs tackled a U.S. senator who was ‘just trying to ask a question,” they said.
The episode happened on June 12, but it continues to resonate on the 14. The Irrelevant Media Complex and every Democrat politician in Alpha Centauri are trying to make hay out of the episode. They won’t succeed. My own suspicion is that the event was carefully orchestrated by the left. We do know that the original video was curated by Padilla staff and fed to the media. Subsequently, other, longer clips emerged that clearly showed Padilla acting in a belligerent, street-thuggish sort of way, roughly attempting to push his way through security to get to the podium from which Noem spoke. As Eddie Scarry, writing in The Federalist, noted, Padilla
was not just “asking a question”; he was interrupting a cabinet secretary’s formal event. That Padilla is a senator makes no difference. When he’s on the Senate floor or hosting his own press conference, it would be just as inappropriate for Noem or anyone else in the executive branch to disrupt it by aggressively advancing toward Padilla and shouting over his remarks.
“But, but he said he was a senator,” the libs have been wailing in unison. “So what?” as Scarry asked. “The public parks of L.A. are crawling with people who think they’re royalty.” Moreover, as Carter Evans, a reporter for CBS, noted, Padilla did not identify himself until he was grabbed by the Secret Service. “Only then,” Evans reported, “after he was being dragged out the room, that he identified himself as a US Senator.”
One thing you would have heard a lot about if only the principal actor had been a Trump supporter was the shooting murder of Minnesota State Rep. Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, and her husband, Mark, as well as the wounding of State Sen. John Hoffman, also a Democrat, and his wife, Yvette. It took the police several hours to apprehend the suspect. During that time, the Irrelevant MC began working itself up into a frenzy. The killings were “politically motivated.” The victims were Democrats. Ergo, the culprit must be a right-winger.
That, anyway, is what Brian Stelter’s fevered brain concluded.
In the last week, Marines were deployed in an American city, the president has called for a gov to be arrested &the speaker of the House has called for that gov to be tarred & feathered, a senator has been pinned & handcuffed, and 2 state legislators have been shot in their homes.
“It all,” Stelter said, “points in the same direction,” i.e., to the bad orange man, DJT.
Alas for the narrative, it turns out that the apprehended suspect is one Vance Boelter, a Democrat, an appointee of Governor Tim Walz, and someone whose car was full of “No Kings” flyers. He apparently gained entry to his victims’ houses because he was impersonating a police officer. Had he been at a press conference where a Cabinet member he didn’t like was speaking, maybe he would have shouted that he was a U.S. senator.
On the international front, June 14 marked the second day of Israel’s amazingly successful dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program and the elimination of the scientists who made it possible, and the terrorist bureaucrats who have been itching to destroy Israel as soon as they were able to. Iran has made a feeble effort to respond, but the regime is close to being overwhelmed by the very country they are trying to destroy.
All commercial air traffic has been halted in Iran, but dozens of people identified as government officials and their families have been videoed fleeing the country. Many are predicting the end of the insane Shia regime, whose constant refrains are “Death to America” and “Death to the Zionist Entity.”
I suspect the people predicting the end of the regime are right. There are widespread anti-regime demonstrations. The Israelis have seriously hampered the government’s ability to respond. I would not be surprised if, within a few days of reading this, it was announced that the Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had gone to meet his 72 virgins in the sky. If that happens, it will be curtains for that barbaric Islamist regime.
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