Good morning! It’s Sunday, March 29, 2026. Today is National Mom and Pop Business Owners Day. It’s also World Piano Day. In recognition of the former, it’s time to find a small business and support it. In recognition of the latter, I give you a cut from David Lanz that he recorded back in 1988 in honor of Bartolomeo Cristofori, who invented the piano in or around 1700. It’s called “Cristofori’s Dream.”
1638 – First permanent white settlement in Delaware, Fort Christina (now Wilmington), is founded by Swedish Lutherans.
1795 – Ludwig van Beethoven (24) has his debut performance as a pianist at the Burgtheater in Vienna, Austria.
1806 – Construction is authorized of the Great National Pike, better known as the Cumberland Road, becoming the first United States federal highway.
1827 – 20,000 people attend Ludwig van Beethoven’s burial in Vienna, Austria.
1848 – Niagara Falls stops flowing for 30 hours due to an ice jam in the river upstream.
1867 – British North America Act (Canadian constitution) is given Royal Assent.
1871 – Royal Albert Hall is opened by Queen Victoria in London.
1929 – U.S. President Herbert Hoover has the first telephone installed on the desk in the Oval Office at the White House.
1968 – Teri Garr guest stars in the “Assignment: Earth” episode of the original Star Trek TV series.
Birthdays today include: Cy Young, Hall of Fame pitcher; Lavrentiy Beria, Soviet politician and head of the NKVD secret service; Eugene McCarthy, U.S. politician; Sam Walton, founder of Walmart; John Belk, founder of Belk Department Stores; Billy Carter, brother of President Jimmy Carter; singer Astrud Gilberto; Eric Idle (Monty Python); former British PM John Major; keyboardist Vangelis; singer Terry Jacks; and actress Marina Sirtis.
If it’s your day as well, have a happy!
* * *
Predictability.
That word kept coming up in my mind as I watched the news feeds from yesterday’s supposedly grassroots protests. It was all totally and easily predictable. All I could do was shake my head and head for bed, while considering it a positive that I’d already picked out my subject for today’s column.
I’m just old enough to remember a time when predictability was a net positive—a sales point. When you buy a car, a truck, or an appliance, or when you search for an employee to fill the ranks of your business, predictability is something you invariably seek. When you seek a spouse, someone you can annoy for the rest of your natural lives, predictability is always a point of consideration. (Unfortunately, in that case, predictability only works out about 50% of the time now.) I’ll bet that most of the protestors yesterday can recall that time, too.
As our Kevin Downey Jr, said yesterday:
If you woke up to the overwhelming stench of Ben Gay and cat urine, that can only mean one thing: your neighborhood has been invaded by a “No Kings” brigade, consisting largely of befuddled elderly people and salad-dodging, testiphobic broads whose hirsute armpit hairlines stretch to their upper lips.
And yes, that’s quite true… in large numbers, that’s what constituted the newsmaking events of yesterday. Bengay cream was definitely in the air. But that was not all of it. Oh no—that would be too easy.
When I wrote yesterday’s column, I added as a parting shot, a line that every leftist on the planet would call an unwarranted assumption, but something that was all too predictable, given the history of the thing:
“Remember, gang, as you watch the riots erupting today: Businesses and municipalities have never had to board their windows because of conservatives.”
A guess? A long shot? No.
It was, in fact, a lock, sure bet, and not by means of the geriatric division of “No Kings.” There are always the enforcers who lead this charge. I like to call them the Blitzkrieg Brigade. These are the people who show up specifically to create as many violent confrontations as possible, all while making sure they’re not on anyone’s camera: tossing cement blocks at anyone wearing a badge, breaking windows, and just being a general pain in the cheeks. In other words, they’re representing leftist, peaceful values. This is, if you’ll recall, one of my axioms:
“Leftists will invariably promote their concepts of peace, love, and equality with violence, vandalism, intolerance, and rage.”
The confirmation of my prediction was easy to find. I was basically assaulted with that confirmation by the crawlers I had running last night while I slept. The New York Post’s banner story this morning includes this:
No Kings demonstrations in Portland, Oregon got out of hand in the evening with protesters sporting gas masks attacking police officers who were trying to control the crowd, according to video posted on X by FreedomNews.tv. There was no immediate word on arrests.
In Dallas, Police had to separate No Kings demonstrators from “Pro America” counter demonstrators as the two groups engaged in heated clashes. Video of the scene showed a protester being hauled away and arrested and other shouting “f–k you” at apparent pro-Trump demonstrators who were carrying flags and automatic weapons.
A large mob of demonstrators waving Palestinian and other flags hurled cement blocks towards Department of Homeland Security agents in Los Angeles.
Indeed, the violence in L.A. led to a dispersal order by the police, leading to multiple arrests, according to CBS News:
As the rally continued downtown on Saturday, Los Angeles Police Department officers told CBS LA that the city was on “tactical alert” and that a dispersal order was issued just after 5:30 p.m., urging people on Alameda between Aliso and Temple to leave the area within 15 minutes or be subject to arrest.
They said that “multiple demonstrators” failed to disperse and were being taken into custody at around 6 p.m. At the same time, U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli also posted on social media to note that federal agents have “started arresting those who assaulted our personnel at the Los Angeles courthouse.”“To those who were smashing concrete blocks and throwing them at our officers, we have you on video,” Essayli’s post said. “We will find you and arrest you too. You’ve been warned.”
Well, forgive my far-from-unique observation, but California’s left-leaning lawmakers and district attorneys have not exactly been a deterrent to such violence. I mean, especially when the violent protestors are getting paid for it, as we discovered last June:
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., launched an investigation into a left-wing group in California that he says may be financially supporting violent protests in Los Angeles.
Hawley wrote a letter to the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) on Wednesday, saying the organization may have an “alleged role in financially and materially supporting” protests and riots in Los Angeles, which he described as “coordinated.”
“Who is funding the LA riots? This violence isn’t spontaneous. As chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime & Terrorism, I’m launching an investigation to find out,” Hawley announced on social media.
Who is funding the LA riots? This violence isn’t spontaneous. As chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime & Terrorism, I’m launching an investigation to find out – pic.twitter.com/B4qaN8qbZP
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) June 11, 2025
The activity is taxpayer funded, as we discovered at the same time:
If you are a Californian, the current LA riots are an example of your tax dollars hard at work.
The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Right—CHIRLA—is one of the key players in fomenting the violent response to immigration enforcement actions. It’s an LA-based nonprofit with a… pic.twitter.com/PSzSsdu0hg
— Laura Powell (@LauraPowellEsq) June 9, 2025
It’s easy to figure that the “blue” areas of the country—inner cities, mostly—are all, to one degree or another, similarly affected, and that those areas are where the majority of the violence is located, once they bus everyone in, at least. The “No Kings” nonsense, including the violent attacks on law enforcement, is not the grassroots effort they try to tell us it is. Our Tim O’Brien gets into this in his column this morning:
There are two kinds of protests. The first is the spontaneous, grassroots, organic kind. When people and the media see protests, they almost always assume protests are of this kind. But there’s a second kind of protest that is far more common these days on the left, and conservatives are the only ones talking about it — the manufactured protest. Intelligence agencies are very good at the process of creating these sorts of contrived protests.
It takes an unbelievable amount of work and time to gin up a protest that’s not driven by populism.
Well, yeah, and it also takes time and money to spring the storm troopers—you know, the ones attacking our law enforcement—out of jail from their previous protests. Nobody’s going to take a bunch of geriatrics walking peacefully, carrying professionally pre-printed signs, unless the muscle is there to create enough mayhem to attract the all-too-willing news media.
Tim also gets into the all-important question of funding the protests. Worth a read. Tell him I said so.
It’s striking, though, through all of this, that the one thing that is also predictable is the lack of any serious consequences for the violent protestors in nearly every case, particularly in blue areas. After all, the politicians running those areas benefit politically from those protests. And that’s what yesterday’s “protest” was really all about.
Thought for the day: He who spares the bad injures the good. — Publilius Syrus
Take care of yourself today. Nobody’s going to do that like you will. I’ll see you tomorrow.
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