There is an interesting distinction being made in America right now and I want to make sure everyone is clear on it.
When a sitting president tells his followers to march on the Capitol because he didn’t like the way an election went — that is a rallying cry. A movement. A expression of passion from the people.
When a citizen observes that perhaps the people should respond to a president who has admitted to insider trading, manipulated markets for personal profit, fired the military leadership, and explicitly threatened the First Amendment, that is potentially seditious. That is a line not to be crossed. That is the kind of thing that gets noted.
Same castle. Completely different rules depending on who benefits from the storming.
Let’s be clear about what has been admitted and documented.
On April 9th 2025 at 9:37 in the morning the President posted on his social media platform that it was a great time to buy. Less than four hours later he announced a 90 day pause on tariffs. The S&P 500 surged 9.5 percent — one of the strongest single day performances in decades. His personal stake in Trump Media increased by approximately 400 million dollars in a matter of hours. He later acknowledged he had already been considering the pause before telling the public to buy.
That is insider trading. Admitted. Documented. Timestamped.
In any previous era — any previous administration — that sequence alone would have produced congressional hearings, an SEC investigation, and a constitutional crisis. Instead it produced a news cycle and then another news cycle about something else.
I come from a time when the castle would have been stormed by now.
Not because people were more violent. Because people were less willing to accept the unacceptable with a shrug and a scroll.
Watergate produced street protests, congressional spine, and an eventual resignation. Nixon hadn’t admitted to insider trading. Nixon hadn’t fired the military leadership. Nixon hadn’t threatened citizens with sedition for political commentary he disagreed with. By the standards of any previous American political crisis what is happening now would have produced a constitutional response before this sentence was written.
Instead we get campaign emails promising a share of the tariff money. Money the courts already told him to return. A promise we all know will never be kept arriving in inboxes between ads for pillows and supplements.
I keep asking myself where the outrage is. Not the content outrage, the carefully calibrated social media kind that generates engagement and never quite becomes action because action has costs and content has revenue. The real kind. The kind that shows up in person and doesn’t leave until something changes.
And then I remember.
Sheep don’t storm castles.
They stand in the field and wait to be shorn. Again and again and again. Occasionally complaining to each other about the cold. Occasionally sharing a strongly worded post about the shearer’s technique.
Then they get turned into shepherd’s pie.
The First Amendment is still technically standing. I am using it right now and I note the irony carefully. The press secretary has already put us on notice that what we say can be reframed as sedition at their discretion. The line is deliberately undefined because the uncertainty is the point. You don’t have to prosecute everyone. You just have to make everyone uncertain enough that they put down the pen.
