No kings

The noise works. Each crisis competes with the next until it’s a blur of chaos. The shutdown story gets replaced by an airport story, which gets replaced by a celebrity scandal, which gets replaced by the latest congressional meltdown. By the time the headlines circle back, the damage is done. Federal employees miss mortgage payments. Small businesses delay payroll. The economy slows not because of market forces, but because some elected officials mistake theater for work. And everyone is exhausted.

It is important here to call out that when the government shuts down, the bills don’t stop for the around 750,000 federal employees. And yet, members of Congress still get paid.

Meanwhile, unredacted Epstein files hover on the edge of public release, promising a rare look into how proximity to wealth and power bends the rules of accountability. There are nearly enough bipartisan votes to unseal them, but the timing is telling — unfortunately, Congress needs to be in session to hold a vote.

And then there’s the theater of force. ICE detaining the wrong people. National Guard troops deployed to “restore calm” in Portland against inflatable art. Is it a display of strength or insecurity? A government that cannot manage its budget or maintain public trust often instead  tries to show its relevance through motion and muscle. When leadership loses moral authority, it too frequently compensates with spectacle.

Even the ideological lines have started to blur. Marjorie Taylor Greene arguing to save ACA subsidies is less a sign of unity than of exhaustion. Have even the loudest chaos agents are starting to call for calm, not because they’ve changed, but because chaos has stopped serving them?

We’ve been here before. The Pentagon Papers and Watergate. COINTELPRO and Iran-Contra. The Clinton investigations, the Iraq intelligence failures, the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington, and the bailouts that followed. Each generation gets its own lesson in distraction and denial. The details change, but the pattern doesn’t. The scandals get bigger, faster, more photogenic and amplified like never before.

When power fears light, it reaches for chaos. Not always deliberately, sometimes just instinctively, because institutions protect themselves first. But the danger is more than too much noise, it’s that we forget “the people” still have the power to turn the volume down and focus on what matters. Attention is a muscle, and discipline is still a choice. We can demand better, ask harder questions, and refuse to mistake performance for progress. The point must be to tune in with purpose.

Somewhere along the way, distraction became its own form of governance. Keep the public overwhelmed, and outrage replaces accountability. The bandwidth for civic attention shrinks. People stop expecting clarity or truth because confusion and closed door meetings start to feel normal.

But distraction has both an economic cost and a democratic one. Every shutdown undermines the faith that work will be rewarded and service will be honored. Every spectacle chips away at the idea that power can be used responsibly. The result is a slow corrosion of trust, the one currency democracy can’t print more of. And, it’s what we need to protect the most.

Here’s the thing, the American promise was built on a simple idea: no kings. No one above the law, no one immune to consequence, no one too powerful to question. That’s what the Founders meant by a government of laws and not of men. But when distraction becomes the dominant political language, laws start to bend toward volunteer puppeteers often with the biggest reasons to raise their hands.

The only cure for distraction is focus. The only antidote to fear is light. And the only protection for democracy is participation. No kings means paying attention even when it’s exhausting. It means looking past the noise and asking who benefits when the public is too dizzy to notice. It means voting not for personalities or parties, but for accountability.

Democracy isn’t undone in a single moment of corruption, it erodes each time we stop looking, each time we decide the noise is too much. Don’t look away.