Why Are "No Kings" Protestors So Old?

Watching the No Kings protests last weekend, I noticed something really weird. Let's just put politics aside for a second and observe the footage. It's what the biz calls Q-tips. Almost every head in that crowd has white or gray hair. It wasn't college kids. It wasn't the next wave of the resistance. It was the same generation that once marched against Vietnam and sang along to Kumbaya. We all see it, and we all feel a little sad, like it's almost indecent. Why are we watching, uncomfortably, arguably the most successful and privileged generation in American history, living out their twilight years in public agony and embarrassment?

I'm just so scared. I'm 74 years old. I worry about everything, and I just, I just, I just am so scared and upset, and I don't, and I don't understand why people do. for this person. Everyone sees it and no one has a satisfactory answer. Why are the No Kings protesters so old? But first, a word from our sponsor. We are called to pray for our enemies, but do you know how to? New from Holy Heroes comes another prayer card to help.

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Holy Heroes, bringing the joy of the faith to your family. Back to those boomers. The No Kings rallies are a geriatric replay of 1968. Why are the old people so politically traumatized and anxious still? Today's elderly activists don't live on the college quad. The rich ones live in active adult communities like the villages, and they spend a lot of time on screens listening to warnings that democracy is under attack. Boomers are still the most devoted TV watchers in America, almost five hours a day on average.

And as the Internet has become easier to navigate, they've migrated there, too. Over-55s now spend more than half their media time online, streaming cable news, scrolling Substack, reposting MSNBC clips on Facebook. So, while younger generations may be forming their worldview through short bursts on TikTok, most boomers are marinating in the long-form anxiety of 24-hour cable news. Have you popped into CNN or Fox News lately? The ads say it all, almost exclusively pharma and elderly targeted. Legacy Media Outlet's entire business model depends on rage-baiting grandpa to sell their attention to advertisers.

Boomers have also found their own set of digital influencers. Case in point, Heather Cox Richardson. She's one boomer influencer with an audience of 2.7 million on Substack and over 3.5 million on Facebook, all mostly white women over 55. Her nightly letters from an American, like a religious ritual, always follow the same pattern. There's a date, a news story, And a dire warning. Everything for the last 10 years has been a prelude to an authoritarian takeover by evil Republicans. Here's a few juicy tidbits.

From Trump 1.0, she wrote, this is the story of a dictator on the rise, taking control of formerly independent branches of government and using the power of his office to amass power. When Trump started his second term, she wrote, now, back in office. Trump is dismantling the government, as movement conservatives have wanted for decades. Richardson represents older op-ed journalists who stepped in to fill the void for boomers who either lost faith in the New York Times and NPR, or just wanted something more easily consumable on their iPads.

Retirement and affluence gave her audience time to consume, process, and respond to the steady online drip. The absolute horror show that is Trump's administration, which is, somehow, made even worse by the view that MAGA-era conservatism no longer values democracy. Why did they fall for it? Well, when your real community shrinks, when your kids move away and go child-free, your spouse passes, your church attendance drops, those online communities start to feel like family, like a church. New monologues become the gospel, monitoring the situation becomes your daily liturgy, and the cause becomes the new grandchild.

But, like all fake religions, this one is... Ultimately, irrational. No Kings is absurd. Protesting Trump because he acts like a king is irrational. He won the popular vote, he is delivering on his campaign promises, like them or not, and unlike any dictator in human history, he has respected the First Amendment rights of the No Kings boomers who make the most vile accusations, he rapes children, and publicly call for his death. Okay, so for a birthday present, what do you hope happens?

You know, you wake up tomorrow morning. I hope that I see the obituary that we're all waiting for tomorrow. That's what I hope for. You're wishing that President Trump is dead? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. It's not just irrational. It's anti-rational. Because it also abuses the meaning of democracy by substituting it in for the Democratic Party. Basically, if the American majority elect Republicans, no king's cries, end of democracy. The media diet also turns lovely old people into white supremacists who are Perfectly comfortable telling black Americans that they're bad blacks.

And now you're getting upset with me because I'm talking about the great things that our great president, Donald J. Trump, is doing. I mean, I don't understand. like raping children. What children? What children? What children? What children? Which one? Which one? Give me an example. You know what's the shame of all this? What's the shame of all this? You're black. What has my color got to do with it? It has a lot to do with it. Tell me. Tell me what.

Tell me why. Because he hates non-white people. Really? Show me. All you have to do is wave a sign and say Trump is Hitler and you can justify just about any kind of behavior. After all, it's all in the service of the cause. That's intoxicating, especially when you've spent decades feeling ignored by your kids, by your church, by the society that you built. A new national study shows that while loneliness and isolation among older Americans have mostly returned to pre-pandemic levels, that's not saying much, because those normal levels are bleak.

More than one-third of adults between 50 and 80 years old say, They feel lonely, and 75% report their mental health is fair or poor. We're talking about millions of people, our parents, our neighbors, our grandparents, sitting in quiet houses or apartments, scrolling, consuming Heather Cox Richardson, waiting for a call that never comes. Loneliness is tragically easy to exploit. Media narratives and political campaigns target older Americans precisely because they vote reliably, they donate consistently, and they consume information uncritically. When you've been told for years that democracy will die if one man wins an election, it starts to sound like the apocalypse, and every protest feels like you're saving the world.

No Kings offers the next dopamine hit, a reason to get out of the apartment, a feeling of purpose. And let's be frank. When we age, we lose our mental plasticity and our ability to think clearly and critically about what we encounter in the world.

For most of us, our principles become fixed, and our trust tree is determined. And the No Kings culture found a willing audience in millions of sad, lonely elderly. You can relive 1968. You can make a difference. And there's one big factor in boomer loneliness that we are not talking about enough. Only about half of Americans between 50 and 90 are grandparents today. In 2018, it was 57%. The number is falling fast. Why? Because their children, and especially if their children went liberal, had fewer children.

Many of their sons and daughters self-sterilized, literally and ideologically, believing that freedom meant independence from babies. One woman, who is lucky enough to be a grandmother in Milwaukee, told reporters that she skipped her granddaughter's soccer game. To attend the No Kings protest because she wanted to ensure her granddaughter has a future. She wore the full Handmaid's Tale costume, the red robe, white bonnet, the whole thing. You can almost see the heartbreak in that. The love for a child twisted through fear and misplaced trust into the wrong moral vision.

There's something noble in her impulse, wanting to protect, to nurture, and to fight for the next generation. That's what mothers and grandmothers do and should do. But when family ties thin out, when faith disappears, that instinct doesn't vanish. It just gets redirected toward the cause. For many aging women, there's no granddaughter's soccer game to go to. There's a march instead, and a cause to mother. It's an inversion of motherhood, a protective instinct. Protecting democracy and the planet, women's rights, in place of the children and grandchildren they never had or only see once a year.

In earlier generations, old age often meant a turn inward toward mentoring and faith, the nurturing of grandchildren, the building and enjoyment of a legacy. My own grandmother spent her days at daily mass, saying the rosary for us. Caring for her great-grandchildren to spare them a few hours from daycare, running a food pantry, driving herself all over town well past the days when that was safe for her or anyone else on the road to bring communion to the sick. It wasn't fancy, but her life was very full to the very end.

She would have taken one look at the No Kings crowd and wondered, what, they didn't have a soccer game to go to? But the No Kings crowd? They're the ones who set out to smash the patriarchy, and grew old to find that instead they had hollowed out their own churches and families. So, No Kings isn't necessarily just about malice. It could be unspeakable heartbreak concealed under the guise of saving America. But we're not off the hook either. A lot of this is on us, the children and grandchildren of the boomers.

We don't like to talk about it, but modern America is cruel to the elderly. In a sane society, the elderly would hold a place of honor, a seat at the family table, a role in guiding the young. Instead, we warehouse them, or encourage them, if they offer, to warehouse themselves.

We downsize them, sell off the family home, give away all the extra family heirlooms. After all, we can digitize our family photos so much more convenient than boxes of memories. We create entire industries and villages to make sure that they never have to rely on their children or be seen by them. Sure, they tell us it's what they want. I don't want to be a burden. It sounds so noble and selfless.

But self-sufficiency is a lie and a virus, and it feeds the loneliness epidemic. Add in smartphone technology to the mix, social media, streaming, AI companions, and you can live out your final decades without ever really encountering anyone. Old age becomes a kind of curated solitude, and I think that must feel so disorienting. Humans of every developmental age need to be in constant contact with their loved ones, and they need to be in constant contact with their loved ones. With the generations before and after us.

Because we all come to each stage of life a novice, not knowing what it means or how we got here. How did I get to be 44 all of a sudden? It's by rubbing up against the old and the young and the infant that we understand our place. And the boomers don't have that. We wonder why people feel purposeless, why they become anxious and angry and vulnerable to manipulation by their media masters. Pope Leo XIV recently said, the elderly are a gift, a blessing to be welcomed.

A longer life is one of the signs of hope in our time. But he also warned that when a society hides its elderly, it hides its own destiny. He said, the fragility that appears in the elderly reminds us of this common truth.

It is therefore hidden or removed by those who cultivate worldly illusions, so as not to have before their eyes the image of what we will inevitably become. That's true. We hide our old people because they remind us of mortality.

And in doing so, we rob them of purpose. In the Christian vision, old age is not a failure, it is a crown. It's the time to pass on wisdom, to tell the truth plainly, to model endurance and peace. And we've replaced elder with consumer. We tell people in their 70s to stay young and reinvent yourself and age gracefully. And when they can't anymore, when the body gives way, when the mirror stops lying, we offer distractions and a cage instead of dignity and a resting place.

Our elders, yes, even the ones in the No Kings crowd, carry stories we need to hear. They are living reminders of how fragile our ideals can be. And how costly our cultural experiments have been. So, what do we do with this? Well, first, stop mocking them. Stop treating elderly activism as a punchline. Instead, I think we need to see the wound underneath. A generation that tore down its traditions and now feels the chill of what it destroyed. They don't need ridicule.

They need redemption. So, visit your parents. Invite your grandparents into your home. Take them to church with you. And if they're still protesting, listen to them. Really listen to them. I guarantee there is something very deep and very painful going on. Sure, they are protesting Trump. But for most of them, Trump is a stand-in for some deep wound.

They were raised on moral crusades and smashing the patriarchy. There was always the next cause, never the answer to all their prayers. They never learned the peace that comes after victory or the repentance that follows sin. The elderly aren't supposed to disappear or rage against the dying of the light. That's why watching the No King's protests feels so painful and indecent. They're supposed to be the light.

Pope Francis said, old age is not a shipwreck, but a vocation. It is not a tragedy, but a mission. Imagine if that woman in the Handmaid's Tale costume had heard that. I don't know. Maybe she would laugh in your face. Maybe she's too far gone to receive your presence or have a rational conversation with you, but that doesn't matter. You can still honor her, because if we don't honor our elders, we will repeat their mistakes.

Essayist James Baldwin once said, children have never been very good at listening to their parents, but they have never failed to imitate them. The No Kings protesters are a living parable of what happens when a generation is sold a lie in their youth and then denied the dignity of their old age. They have been sold activism instead of meaning, outrage instead of legacy, but they still have souls and stories, and they need our love and attention, and we need theirs. That's the real revolution.

Honoring those who came before us, not because they were perfect, but because they are ours. So, the next time you see those silver-haired protesters holding signs that say, no kings, you say a prayer. Because somewhere inside every one of them is a memory of what they were meant to be, mothers and fathers, mentors, guides. And the only way to heal the world they broke is to love them back into the family that can make them whole again.

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