How the Fuck Are We Still Protesting Kings 250 Years Later?
We declared independence and became subjects to capital.
The first protest I ever went to was No Kings Day on June 14, 2025.
I had to do something besides watch democracy drown from my comfortable life. I took the oath of service at seventeen, joining the Marine Corps believing it meant something to show up when your country needed you. That morning, as I lay in bed overlooking Lake Tahoe, I felt America bleeding out beneath me, two to the chest, one to the head.
We were there for a weekend escape, though escape feels like the wrong word when you carry the world in your pocket. I woke to water lapping against the shore, that particular silence of early morning on a lake. Upstairs, my daughters debated which Descendants movie was superior as they poured cereal, their voices carrying the certainty that comes from not yet knowing how fragile everything is. I reached for my phone before reaching for my husband, already knowing what I'd find.
The first headline on my feed was death.
Minnesota Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark had been assassinated in their home, executed by a man dressed as a police officer who walked through their security and disappeared. Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette were in critical care. By morning, Governor Tim Walz had canceled all protests across Minnesota. The president, who days before had taken to Truth Social calling for blood, issued a hollow statement about "horrific violence" without naming it terrorism, without acknowledging the permission structure he'd built with every violent post, every rally, every wink to the militias who heard his dog whistles as commands.
My husband was already awake, staring at his own screen. He turned it toward me, showing another presidential post from the night before: "THEY ARE ALL DEAD NOW. TODAY IS DAY 61."
Sixty-one days earlier, Trump had given Iran a nuclear ultimatum we'd dismissed as more theatrical foreign policy. But while we scrolled past headlines, strikes had begun. Israeli jets were hitting nuclear sites with American coordinates. Military families were evacuating the Middle East. What started as bluster was becoming blood, and June 14, already marked for nationwide protests against authoritarianism, was transforming into something else entirely.
"Maybe we shouldn't go," he said.
The logic was sound. If war escalated while Palestinian flags flew at American protests, they'd call it sedition. They'd already arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate whose only crime was speaking truth at a rally while Palestinian. What if the man who'd murdered Hortman wasn't acting alone? What if showing up made us targets?
We weren't paranoid, we were two former military pilots trained to see patterns. Every phone ping recorded location, every camera would scan faces, every digital breadcrumb swept up by surveillance that missed actual terrorists but would absolutely catch citizens exercising constitutional rights.
My daughters sang upstairs. My husband breathed beside me. War overseas, assassination at home, and between those realities, one question: If I stay home, what am I teaching them?
That safety is earned by silence? That their mother, who swore to defend the Constitution, would hide when it mattered most?
I kissed my husband, tasting morning breath and uncertainty. "Get the girls ready," I said. "We're going."
Because sometimes the most dangerous thing you can do is nothing at all.
The Reckoning
I had written days before that the most likely outcome would be silence. Empty streets, abandoned plans, protest fatigue settling into American bones like chronic pain. People choosing couches over convictions, believing safety meant stillness.
But that isn't what happened. People showed up.
Over thirteen million, if you believe the numbers. Families with strollers, veterans with canes, teachers with signs, teenagers who'd never protested before standing next to elders who remembered when resistance looked different but recognized the same urgency. They weren't waiting for CNN to validate their presence or caring that FOX claimed they were paid actors. They showed up because it was the only currency that still mattered.
I had also written about the worst-case scenario of mass arrests, the Insurrection Act invoked, dissent rebranded as sedition. But the optics never materialized. Federal courts had blocked the government's seizure of California's National Guard, and Khalil's case had set precedent: you couldn't disappear people for speaking truth, not yet.
And there was the best-case scenario I'd barely dared imagine: that beneath algorithmic noise and manufactured division, something in the American psyche would shift. That apathy might transform into something more dangerous to power than rage. That we might remember how to find each other.
My family walked through South Lake Tahoe surrounded by people who'd made the same calculation we had. I'd expected dozens. Instead, hundreds (maybe thousands) filled the streets, some wrapped in flags that meant different things to each person carrying them, others holding children who would remember this day in ways we couldn't predict. It felt impossible until it felt inevitable, the way water finds its level, the way truth finds its voice.
Then came the sound I knew in my bones: a C-130 thundering overhead, practicing touch-and-go landings at the exact hour of our protest. The same aircraft I'd flown for years now circling above citizens exercising their First Amendment rights.
Standing there with my daughters' hands in mine, watching that military bird cast its shadow over peaceful protesters, I felt the same recognition I'd felt at seventeen on the flight line at Miramar, seeing my first C-130 and knowing I'd found my future. Only now, the future I'd sworn to defend and the present I was living in felt like different countries, and I wasn't sure which one I was standing in.
The Corporate Coup
On the other side of the country, the Army turned 250 years old. Young soldiers who should have been celebrating their branch's revolutionary origins had their weekend hijacked by corporate theater. This should have honored the force that rose from citizen militias on June 14, 1775, when our ancestors decided they'd had enough of kings. Instead, they marched beneath banners that revealed our new monarchs.
The grandstand wore sponsors like military ribbons. Coinbase's logo sat beside the Army star, the BlackRock-backed exchange now peddling Trump's $TRUMP meme coin that had conjured $56 billion from nothing before Trump hosted private dinners for the top holders, selling proximity for cryptocurrency. Next came Palantir, the CIA-spawned surveillance company now running the most comprehensive domestic spying apparatus in American history, merging your IRS filings with Social Security claims, healthcare records with ICE reports, DMV photos with protest footage, all flowing into algorithms that score your future threat level before you've committed any crime.
Three days before this parade, the Army commissioned four tech billionaires as lieutenant colonels through something called Detachment 201. The Acting Secretary pinned insignia on the CTOs of Meta, OpenAI, Palantir, and Thinking Machines Lab without requiring even the basic training doctors complete before serving. They were simply given uniforms and authority, transformed overnight from executives into officers, not to lead soldiers but to reprogram warfare itself.
They called it innovation, but Palantir's "Gotham" already scanned American cities through facial recognition while "Maven," the AI that once hunted insurgents in Afghanistan, now flagged families applying for food stamps. ICE agents navigated raids through Palantir's dashboard that transformed deportation into a point-and-click operation, home addresses and social media stitched together by code that reduced human complexity to removal priority.
These soldiers marched past corporate logos of companies already cataloging their faces, ready to mark them as threats the moment they questioned orders. The Army born from revolution against monarchy was celebrating its birthday by swearing fealty to tech oligarchs.
The War Without a Name
The commander in chief who once dodged the draft was quietly drafting us into a war with no name, Pete Hegseth standing beside him with his Jerusalem Cross tattoo hidden beneath pressed cotton and patriotic theater.
Behind the celebration, CENTCOM had ordered military dependents evacuated from Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait while Baghdad's embassy, where I once landed C-130s during our last manufactured war, packed burn bags and cleared staff. No press conferences, just the familiar choreography of preparing runways for what comes after civilians leave.
The justification was ancient propaganda made fresh: Iran. That nuclear specter we've conjured since the 1950s, repeated until questioning it felt treasonous. Yet Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had testified plainly that Iran wasn't building nuclear weapons. Program suspended since 2003. No military enrichment. The IAEA monitored them more aggressively than any nation on earth.
We had proof diplomacy worked. Obama's 2015 deal had dismantled Iran's nuclear program, uranium shipped out, centrifuges destroyed, inspections verified. The deal succeeded perfectly, which was why Trump destroyed it. By 2025, only grievance remained where cooperation once stood.
When Iran extended their hand again, we answered with violence. Israel claimed to have killed Ali Shamkhani, their security chief, while our tanks rolled down Constitution Avenue. Nuclear scientists died in their homes with precision only intelligence sharing provides. American officials denied involvement while blessing Israel's right to defend against threats we created.
I felt 2003 flooding back. I'd been a teenager when recruiters invaded my campus selling lies about Saddam's weapons. My classmates came home in coffins while oil executives signed contracts at their funerals.
General Wesley Clark once revealed the Pentagon's list: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran. Two decades later, we were simply finishing the sequence. No coalition needed. Just empire completing its checklist while we performed consent through silence.
The Breaking of Formation
Between speeches about liberty at Lake Tahoe, I pulled up the parade livestream, keeping it muted while watching something strange unfold. I hit my husband's arm, pointing at soldiers deliberately breaking rhythm, some stepping left while others stepped right, moving forward but refusing to move together.
This wasn't route step, this was cohesion breaking in real time. Anyone who's worn the uniform knows the difference: soldiers deliberately destroying their formation from within. Some exaggerated movements, others barely lifted their feet, turning Trump's desired military spectacle into what it was, a unit refusing to move as one.
The cameras quickly panned away, settling on JD Vance's patient smile. He stood with the stillness of someone already handed tomorrow's keys, waiting for today's engine to fail. But what was a former junior enlisted Marine reservist who'd spent his service writing press releases doing positioned to inherit the American presidency?
His ascent traced to 2011, when Peter Thiel's Yale lecture shattered Vance's assumptions about power and faith. From that day, Thiel became architect, moving Vance from law to venture capital, funding his firms, rehabilitating him after tweets comparing Trump to "cultural heroin" made him radioactive. The rebranding climaxed with fifteen million dollars, the largest Senate campaign check ever written.
Every pivot bore Thiel's fingerprints, the same hands that built Palantir and constructed the surveillance state cataloging every protester. Palantir and Coinbase banners hung over troops who'd deployed to corporate resource wars and would deploy again wherever algorithms determined profit required protection.
Trump was the visible crash. Vance was the clean install, carrying Thiel's fusion of radical capitalism with traditional Christianity, authoritarianism that felt unthreatening until you tried to leave.
As the $45 million taxpayer-funded parade erupted in fireworks, Trump's vision of military precision had dissolved into something that looked nothing like strength. Meanwhile in South Lake Tahoe, our protest was ending with the coordinated movement the military parade had failed to achieve. Families streamed toward parking in organic waves, parents lifting children onto shoulders, neighbors helping fold signs, strangers becoming allies exchanging contacts for the next gathering.
We weren't dispersing. We were spreading. Taking this feeling back to our neighborhoods, our dinner tables, our daily lives where the real work of citizenship happens.
The Exit Wound
As we packed to leave Lake Tahoe, air raid sirens froze me in place. They weren't local, my husband had turned up a livestream from Haifa, but they pierced something in my chest all the same. Another war escalating while we played at protest, blood spinning into strategy on screens we couldn't stop watching.
We drove home through mountains that once belonged to all of us and would soon belong to none. Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" had marked 3.3 million acres for sale, stripped from public trust for developers who would build nothing but control. Utah's Mike Lee, the bill's architect, called it "getting D.C. out of the way." He meant: we're taking what was never ours to sell.
The same Mike Lee who shared memes of an assassin after a Democratic legislator was murdered. Called it "Nightmare on Walz Street." Pinned the joke while two children learned their mother wasn't coming home. This is who decides which mountains get auctioned, which America we're building on the bones of the one we're killing.
Three Americans died that weekend, each death revealing different state violence.
In D.C., a woman was crushed beneath a tank being hauled from Trump's parade. In Salt Lake City, Arthur Folasa Ah Loo, Samoan designer and father of two, was shot when someone pulled a rifle at a protest. His name vanished before his blood dried.
And in Georgia, Adriana Smith was removed from life support four months after being declared brain dead. The 31-year-old nurse had been kept medically alive because Georgia's heartbeat law made her fetus a patient with more rights than she'd had. Her family said goodbye June 18th. Her son breathes in a NICU, born into a country that turned his mother's corpse into legislation.
Adams County Sheriff James Muller celebrated with a Facebook post: a blood-streaked truck labeled "The All-New Dodge Ram Protester Edition." As if running over citizens was a marketing opportunity.
I thought of those soldiers refusing to march in sync, their bodies spelling out what their voices couldn't: we see through this performance. They understood what I was learning, that dissent had become dischargeable, obedience a suicide pact, and the only honest response was to break formation while you still could.
We drove past valleys marked for development, through forests inventoried for profit. Everything sacred flattened into ledger lines. The land beneath our tires wasn't America anymore, it was inventory awaiting extraction.
I used to ask: how the fuck did we get here?
But driving through those mountains, past lands Mike Lee would sell, over ground where Arthur's children would grow fatherless, through the country that kept Adriana's corpse breathing for a law valuing her unborn over her undead, I understood.
We got here by small surrenders. By laughing at the jokes. By looking away from broken formations. By letting them rename liberty until it meant its opposite. By pretending driving away was escape.
We didn’t arrive here, we never left.
About the Author
I’m Alisa Sieber; a writer, veteran, and relentless question-asker, exposing the patterns of power, control, and resistance that shape our world. My work blends personal reckoning with systemic critique, challenging the narratives we’ve been told and demanding we ask harder questions.
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References
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Donald Trump responds to Israeli strikes on Iran: They 'must make a deal'
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Tensions over L.A. immigration sweeps boil over as Padilla is tackled, ICE arrests pick up
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