To get right to the answer to the question in the title, yes, the No Kings protest does indeed indicate a shift in the political zeitgeist. But not in the way that people expect.

To understand what I’m getting at, here’s a pic from the protest just a couple days ago:

Do you see it? Here’s another:

See it yet? But we’re not done yet:

And another:

There’s more:

Wait, how’d that get in there? My mistake. Here’s another:

And more:

That one was a little on-the-nose, but you probably get the point. But for those who think I might be cherry picking, here’s one with a lot of people in frame, which you can save to your device and zoom in on, examining at your leisure:

The overwhelming majority of these crowds are retirement age leftists, which, in some cases, turned out in large numbers.

Left-wing social media personalities are pointing at the numbers, and are making them out to be some victory. Because of course they would. If the left’s cheerleaders aren’t making their following feel good, then their following will find someone who does.

But those numbers are not the victory that the left is making it out to be, especially in light of the fact that, however many leftists  mobilized when summoned, they were still outnumbered by the people who voted in the current president, by popular vote no less.

But that they’re currently outnumbered is not my point. And if you still don’t get it, then consider the following question: Where were all the young people?

It’s an important question, considering that the political zeitgeist is already swinging to the right, and quite heavily in some regards. How much more momentum do you suppose the right is going to gain when all those retirement age leftists age out, not just from working, but also from voting?

We all know the joke: that the dead vote Democrat. But to get serious, we might be on the verge of a major swing to the right, much greater than what we’ve been seeing recently, what with people coming to understand the second order consequences of left-wing policies. If all the people who show up to protests in an attempt to relive their pasts are an indication, a previous generation of leftists are going to leave a bunch of younger right-wingers to determine policy, and a swing to the right that we’ve been seeing in recent times is going to gain a lot more momentum.

To further drive the point home, traffic to sites of corporate media outlets, which tend to have a left-wing bias, is continuing their plunge:

Which makes sense considering that the people who trust them are hugely from the generation that is currently dying out. If there’s a characteristic fallacy of the boomer generation, it would be appeal to authority, though it’s selectively applied, as fallacies often are. It’s their tendency to be less skeptical of the things the people on the TV say.

While there are exceptions, people in the boomer generation haven’t done much to exhibit skepticism. To be fair, that seems to happen when people age. If you’ve had to tell someone not to open strange links or email attachments from people they don’t know, it was probably someone from that generational group.

And when you know that people tend to be more gullible as they age, it’s easy to see why legions and legions of old people have shown up in droves to express the delusional belief that the president that was voted in by electoral college and popular vote is actually a monarch.

That these people influence public policy says a lot about the state of the left.