Still, there are those who continue to show up.
Liz Fletcher, a retired principal from Michigan, volunteered to certify the 2020 election. Afterward, someone spray-painted traitor across her garage. She didn’t quit. She returned in 2022 and again in 2024, counting ballots under police protection. “We the people,” she said. “Not we the violent.”
In July, a new line was crossed.
When protestors gathered outside the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, they were met with drone-mounted acoustic weapons—blasting crowd dispersal tones at 130 decibels. The mayor said he didn’t authorize their use. The footage showed people collapsing, bleeding from the ears. One veteran—Sergeant Malik Rowe, who served two tours in Iraq—called it “the most terrifying sound of his life.”
Two journalists from the Milwaukee Sentinel were detained for five hours with black bags over their heads. The charge was “failure to comply with national security perimeter guidelines.” No such guidelines were ever published. Their editor filed a Freedom of Information Act request. It was denied. National security exemption.
This is what authoritarianism sounds like—measured, muffled, and then suddenly, screaming.
Meanwhile, election volunteers in Arizona began receiving unsigned subpoenas from a new unit in the Department of Justice—Task Force VoterShield. The documents requested private communications and location data dating back to 2020. One recipient, Anjali Giri, asked what law she was being accused of violating. She got no answer. Just a deadline.
And still, despite it all, resistance persists.
It held for Liz. For Priya. For Maya. For the journalist. For the mother. For the senator with the wrong name. For the mayor in a holding cell. For the man dragged from a courtroom. For the veteran bleeding from his ears. And for the woman asked to confess with no charge at all.
On July 17—the fifth anniversary of the death of civil rights leader and former congressman John Lewis—Ameicans will march and protest in cities from Atlanta to Albuquerque. They aren’t asking for calm. They want clarity. Dissent is not a glitch in democracy. It’s the operating system. That’s what Lewis meant when he said: Get in good trouble, necessary trouble.
Today, that kind of trouble gets you flagged, bagged, or disappeared.
No kings. That’s still the point.
But the kingless republic only survives if someone makes noise when the process goes quiet. If someone shows up at a courtroom, or a protest, or a ballot counting station—and stays.
You depose wannabe kings with “good trouble.” But that only works when the good troublemakers aren’t silenced.
Bibliography
1. U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida.
2. Order Granting Summary Judgment in Public Records Act Violation, Case No. 4:22-cv-106, 2022.
3. A federal ruling affirming the violation of First Amendment rights in a public records denial. Cited to demonstrate judicial recognition of transparency as a constitutional issue.
2. Madison, James.