From The Bacchae to the ‘No Kings’ Rallies | The American Spectator

In an ancient Greek play, a deluded woman carries the head of a Greek King onto the stage, whom she has just beheaded. And in June of 2025, during the “No Kings” protest, an equally deluded woman proudly carried an effigy of a severed head through the streets — that of President Trump. Is there a connection between these two events?

Hegel and Karl Marx warned us that the Iron Law of Farce states that history often repeats itself — the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. To take an example, ancient Greece was the cradle of modern democracy, and its decline and fall was an outright tragedy. But, fast-forwarding to today, we ask ourselves if the current backsliding of America, visible in the attacks on Trump, doesn’t exhibit aspects of a farce.

Since Trump was elected, the antics of the Democrat party — devoid of wit, satire, or irony — manifest a darkly comic side that goes beyond horseplay, fun-loving buffoonery, or mere political posturing. It is farce, perhaps bordering on the theater of the absurd, and it is particularly prominent among women. And it is dangerous — both for the women and for America.

At the No Kings rallies in June and October, it is a fact that women were the majority — mostly “affluent white female liberals,” who have been nicknamed Awfls. There were the usual references to Trump as Fascist, Nazi, and Hitler by women dressed in animal costumes. Some carried effigies of a severed head representing Trump. These protests — with their “king must die” syndrome — embody impulses not only of farce, but also of a pathological hate disorder.

And here is where we hark back to ancient Greece and the great Greek playwright Euripides. He wrote his last play, The Raving Ones, or The Bacchae, in exile from his beloved city of Athens, reflecting on the end of its golden age of democracy, and the downfall of a civilization. At the center of the play are the Maenads or Bacchae, the female followers of the dissolute god Dionysus:

The play opens with Dionysus — also going by the name of Bacchus — appearing on stage and vowing vengeance on Pentheus, the King of the Greek city of Thebes, for refusing to worship him. Dionysus wreaks vengeance on the King by driving his own women followers into an insane fury. Attired in animal skins, signifying their wildness and their break from civilized society, the Bacchae flee to the mountains, and practice strange rites.

So violent and frenzied are the Bacchae that they actually end up gruesomely killing the King. And in a horrific twist, the woman who leads this act, the leader of the Bacchae, is the King’s own mother. After she tears one of his arms from its socket, the other women join in, ripping the body to pieces in a ritual dismemberment. In the grisly conclusion, the King’s mother impales her son’s severed head on her ritual staff, and in her delusion, proudly carries it aloft, believing it to be the head of a lion she has hunted. When sanity finally returns to her, and she realizes what she is carrying, she collapses in shock.

I am not suggesting that today’s female protestor groups are equivalent to the Maenads, but I am saying that a certain segment of leftist women, obsessed with politics and Trump hatred, may actually be promoting real violence among unstable people, and may also be a symptom of civilizational decline, just as they were in ancient Greece.

Critic Helen Andrews points to such behavior as being a typically “feminine” approach. Rather than promoting a new policy or a more progressive curricular reform, they reacted with extreme emotion. As an example she cites the case of how a group of feminist extremists cancelled a male president, Larry Summers, at Harvard. The case began with a casual remark that the president had made, that there were fewer advanced female mathematicians than male ones. As he later clarified, he had been referring to statistics indicating that, “at the high end,” there are more men than women (and, interestingly, at the lowest end there are more men than women).

Rather than address the reality of the statistics, the protesters went on the attack, and demanded that he be fired — in what Andrews describes as a very feminine form of protest: “they made emotional appeals rather than logical arguments.” The press, also with no knowledge of the actual performance of female mathematicians, agreed. I myself would add that the protesters apparently had no interest in promoting great real-life female mathematicians, such as Emmy Noether, whom Einstein characterized as one of the most significant geniuses in mathematics and physics in history.

So the protest event turned out to be all feminine feelings in play, not realities.

A second critic is Jonathan Alpert, a New York psychoanalyst, who has written in the Wall Street Journal about Trump Derangement Syndrome. Making the case that the Trump syndrome is indeed sadly real, and often dangerous to the patient, he describes the female protests as “public therapy” sessions, having nothing to do with advancing enlightened political policies.

One of his patients confessed that she was so obsessed with her hatred and fear of Trump, that “she couldn’t enjoy family vacations anymore, because it felt wrong to relax while Trump was still out there. Others reported panic attacks or trouble sleeping after seeing him in the news. Their anxiety had outgrown politics and become a way of being — a screen onto which their unresolved fears and insecurities were constantly projected.”

I might add that our mass media’s 10-year pathological fixation on satanizing Trump should be listed in the DSM mental disorders manual, and perhaps Trump should also be receiving commissions from the pharmaceutical companies for the added anti-anxiety drugs that they are selling. And, perhaps, because “Satan” is obviously roaming our countryside, maybe there should be an exorcism.

So where are the No Kings mobs pointing us today? When the curtain falls on The Bacchae, silence falls on the stage, and also historically on Greece’s Golden Age. It was 400 B.C., and the Golden Age would never return again.

In today’s world, we can only ask ourselves in what direction our madwomen are leading us.

America is hovering over a dangerous cliff. Having had a glorious past, it now finds itself with its democracy and civilization in danger. We should heed the final words of the leader of the Bacchae:

Gods, please lead me to some place

far from the Wilderness of Mount Citharon:

“I have had my fill of Mountain Ecstasy.”

It is a rejection of the violent ecstasy that had possessed her, and had led to such destruction. Many of us have also had our fill of mountain ecstasy, and wish instead to focus on more common-sense practices: a renewed study of science, technology, and math in our schools; a governmental practice of creating business solutions for social problems; and daily lives that value concrete outcomes rather than empty rhetoric. These are what America needs, not a continuing stream of unending hate.

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