I Spent No Kings Day in a Cave

Walking over the underground before it walks over you.

There is a salamander so rare, you can find it only in the Ozarks. It is born wide-eyed and willing, eager to explore its surroundings: blue streams, green forests.

One day, the salamander wanders into a crack in the earth. This is the most fateful decision it will make. The world darkens, but the salamander keeps going: down, down, down, until no light remains. Over time, its skin begins to mutate. A film grows over its eyelids and fuses them shut.

The salamander is now blind. But it does not know. It will live, and die, in the eternal darkness of a subterranean cave.

I spent No Kings Day in a cave because I wanted to see the salamander. But I also wanted to ensure no film comes to cover my own eyes. A cave 250 feet underground has no cell service and no surveillance. It has no AI or GPS. Lone light shines from lanterns held by humans. They reveal a labyrinthine land of stone, not dead but slow growing. I go to caves to reset my senses. They show me the peace I am missing.

On the drive to the Ozarks, I saw a photo on social media. A protester held a handmade sign with a warning I wrote years ago: “THIS IS A TRANSNATIONAL CRIME SYNDICATE MASQUERADING AS A GOVERNMENT.”

I’ve seen these words on signs for nearly a decade. In Trump’s first term, they were plastered around St. Louis by activists from the local Indivisible group. Now they’ve been revived. I’m glad people read my words, but I wish they didn’t still resonate. I want my books housed under “History” instead of “Current Events.” I want my warnings to be heeded and an alternate America to emerge: the America we deserve.

That outcome looks less likely each year. Time is the autocrat’s weapon: that’s why DOJ lackeys crowing “Be patient” were integral to mafia state rule. Officials knew what Trump was before they let him in, in part because he wouldn’t stop telling everyone. The remedy lay not only in exposing Trump but stopping the forces behind him. No one in power wanted to do that, for it would reveal institutional complicity.

As I wrote in January, “The most important thing about the election is not that Trump was proclaimed the winner, but that he was allowed to run.”

Despite my own ominous message, I was heartened to see the sign. I am grateful for the protesters: their refusal to abide tyranny and genocide, their insistence that immigrants and migrants be protected, their creativity and defiance. Protesting is honorable. Protests show the magnitude of dissent and shape new alliances.

Protests matter in their own right. But in the 21st century, protests have not brought policy change. Americans have never protested so much yet gained so little leverage. This is not the fault of protesters but of the multifaceted mafia state.

“No Kings” is a misnomer. Trump is not in charge. A birthday with a military parade gives the trappings of a king. But Trump is only the frontman for transnational organized crime. That’s all he ever was or will be.

Trump did not rise to this position alone. US officials have grown a second skin, one that seals their eyes and their deals and their documents. They entered the darkness of the mafia state and did so knowingly. Had they not, Trump could have never run in 2016 or in 2024. Party allegiance indicates whether a US official acts as an abuser (GOP) or an enabler (Democrat). But when they speak, it is often with one voice.

Now that voice is calling for war. This is another reason I descend beneath the earth.

US officials want war with Iran. They want it because Israel wants it and they do what Israel says. Israel has been planning to strike Iran since 2024: a timeline which makes Kamala Harris’s rehabilitation of Iraq warmongers look less like a campaign and more like an audition, and November resemble less an election than a selection.

Trump showed his willingness to abet an Iran War in his first term. The only question for Iran warmongers was whether they would rather have an ambitious bureaucrat like Harris or put up, again, with Trump’s mercurial grift.

The notion of not having an Iran War is dismissed. Israel is the main instigator but not the only one. The military-industrial complex wants war, apocalypse fiends want war, and alphabet agencies have had an Iran grudge since before I was born.

I don’t like comparing US officials to an Ozark blind salamander, because it is insulting to the salamander. But US officials have been obeying and abetting so long that they don’t remember what it’s like to see the world for what it is — or realize that we can see them for what they are, too.

* * *

The cave opening was a third of a mile into the woods. We gathered at the trailhead as the guide detailed our journey. It was rare for Cathedral Cave to be open. So rare that I, a cave connoisseur, had never been inside.

There were about twelve of us: my husband and kids, a few couples, and some folks from India who had never seen a cave. Everyone was excited that their first time would be in Missouri. A man in a Cardinals T-shirt asked me where I lived. When I said “St Louis”, he gave me the eye reserved for city folk.

“I’m from Kimmswick,” he said. A town of 134 people.

“Home of the levee-high pie!” I exclaimed. “I ate that pie, that big huge apple pie. And you have the apple butter festival! And the strawberry festival. We tried to go once, but it was too crowded.”

“The strawberry festival.” The man shuddered. “Don’t get me started. We get out of town for that. Stay and it’s 45 minutes to drive half a mile.”

“You had some hard years with the floods, right? 2019, 2022.” Canceled events, sandbags on riverbeds.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “We need that festival. The apple butter one too.”

“Once,” I said, “We went to Kimmswick without even knowing it was Deer Widow’s Weekend. My husband spent the whole time wandering around like, ‘Why am I the only man in town?!”

Everyone laughed. Later in the cave, the man in the Cards shirt helped a one-armed man make his way down the slippery paths, ensuring he was safe.

“Did everyone get bug spray?” asked our guide, a peppy parks ranger. “The ticks are bad this year. And there’s that new tick, the really bad one. The one that makes you allergic to meat.”

Everyone gasped. Here was a Missouri tragedy.

“Is that real?” asked my son. “All meat? Even hot dogs?!”

“It’s real,” the guide confirmed. “Allergic to all meat. Except fish and chicken, but those don’t count. I know someone who got bit. She’s a vegan now.”

We gasped again. Someone grabbed the spray and began frantically reapplying.

“Now there’s a shame,” said the Cardinals man.

“Poor thing,” a woman murmured.

“OK!” said the guide after a moment of silence for the tragic vegan. “We’re going to hike to the cave. Does everyone have their lanterns?”

We held up our “lanterns,” which were flashlights, but we liked the delusion. Cathedral Cave used to be a show cave when it was owned by Lester Dill, who also owned its neighbor, Onondaga Cave. I wrote about Dill in my book The Last American Road Trip, for he was a quintessential American: the inventor of the bumper sticker and tacky PR stunts, and an environmentalist who spent his final years saving Missouri’s caves and rivers from destruction. Dill led a life of wild contradictions: like his state, like his country.

In the 1930s, Cathedral Cave was a show cave with electricity. When the electricity broke in the 1970s, and thieves stole the copper wire, Dill decided not to fix it, but instead make Cathedral a “wild cave” lit by lantern. Missourians excel at transforming laziness and destruction into entertainment.

At the end of the trail stood a moss-covered concrete cube with a padlocked door. Here our guide showed us photos of the blind salamander, talking him up like a long-lost friend. She noted he had been hard to spot, but we should give a holler if he appeared. She gave the requisite warnings about not touching cave formations and urged us to protect bats vulnerable to white nose syndrome. I have heard these warnings for decades, but I never tire of them, because they mean someone cares.

She unlocked the door. A blast of cool air initiated our descent. We climbed into Cathedral Cave, navigating puddles and switchbacks. The railing was gritty from age but the formations dazzled, indifferent to time. Stalactites glistened with pearls of water: the ceiling lived. The guide noted that caves are impervious to earthquakes and other natural disasters. Stromatolites outlast everything: they are older, she said, than the rings of Saturn. It would take a deliberate act of man to destroy the underworld.

It takes the underworld to destroy the underworld, I thought, contemplating the Iran warmongers and their dark triads and their nukes. They entered my mind the moment the guide jokingly called the cave entrance a “bunker”. I had been bunker-shopping for the whole 21st century.

The day after Trump’s 2017 inauguration, wary of the new president’s nuke enthusiasm, I took my children on a tour of an abandoned lead mine. It’s called Bonne Terre — “good land” — and offers boat rides deep in the earth that French settlers destroyed. A sign showcases the mine safety record: “Folks We Blowed Up,” “Folks We Jest Plain Lost,” “Folks Et by Critter.” These labels later were used as CDC guidelines during the pandemic. I’m just kidding: the CDC doesn’t have guidelines!

It was a cold sweet January day: my kids oblivious to the worry in my mind, and my mind oblivious to how bad things would get. It did not occur to me then that the CDC would be destroyed under a Democrat, or that Biden would be a Placeholder President for Trump, or that Trump would reappear in four-year increments like Mafia Grover Cleveland. 2017 was the era of endless reboots, when every band or movie or TV series was brought back from the dead. We didn’t know Trump was the final show. The end point of the American monoculture, the last spectacle all could see.

The guide showed us a shadow that resembled an old man reading a newspaper. I wondered if young people had ever seen an old man read a newspaper, or if that silhouette was lost to history.

We kept an eye out for the blind salamander, but it never showed. I wondered if it could sense us as we walked by. Or if it stayed cocooned in its own darkness, not remembering what a human being was, what color was, what sunshine was. I wanted to shine my light on it to see if it felt warmth.

We care about you, little guy, I thought. You didn’t ask for what happened to you either.

* * *

Outside, we bid farewell to our fellow cave dwellers and returned to our car. Once we reached the highway, I got internet access and was gripped with fear. I had expected brutal crackdowns like in Los Angeles. Crackdowns were happening, but not at the scale I feared. Comradery, instead, ruled No Kings Day. In every state, in every region, Americans banded together.

I sighed in relief until I read about the murder of State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband by a right-wing fanatic impersonating a policeman. I remembered Esther Salas, the New Jersey judge whose son was murdered in 2020 by an anti-feminist fanatic impersonating a delivery man.

I remembered other public servants threatened with murder: the judges and juries of the Paul Manafort and Roger Stone trials, the poll workers in every election. Threats so frequent they’ve become nearly as routine as school shootings, but are treated as novel by officials, because the public is supposed to forget that these horrors could have been prevented had they been taken seriously at the start.

I remembered when I had to have an undercover bodyguard at a 2016 conference after proclaiming that the Trump administration would be a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government. No one believed me back then except the crime syndicate, which is why I needed a bodyguard.

Now folks believe me but for the worst reasons. I was the canary in the coal mine and now I prefer to stay underground. I’d rather be Persephone than Cassandra.

I scrolled the news, alternating between protests and war. I worry the No Kings protests will be analyzed to create a strategy to suppress antiwar demonstrators. Americans do not want an Iran War and their objections span party lines.

The largest protests in US history happened in the 21st century. In 2003, mass protests challenged the Bush administration but could not stop the Iraq War. During the first Trump term, civil rights protests dwarfed those of the 1960s but led to no meaningful policy change. It’s been twenty-five years of lost leverage and broad betrayals.

An Iran War could spark a formidable protest coalition. Most Americans do not remember winning a war and are wary of quagmire ventures. We’re used to losing at home and abroad but even loss has it limits. We are not losing things so much as having them stolen, and we know it.

Operatives know it too, which is why their plan for garnering war support is “a catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” This is not my idea, but that of a conservative think tank report from 1997, whose authors went on to guide the Iraq War after the 9/11 attacks. Its’s an idea that retains currency.

Given the protests’ ineffectiveness, one might think the US government wouldn’t bother suppressing them. But that is not how mafia states operate. Free speech, free assembly, free thought: all are too unpredictable. A mafia state is a commercial enterprise. A war is, too. Neither can be challenged by the people’s will, especially when those leading it are notorious for bloodlust, genocide, and impunity.

To even frame the mafia state in an unflattering light is considered an affront. We already have prohibitions on criticizing Israel (even though we still can, and should, criticize the US.) It is likely that protest against an Iran War will be falsely labeled “antisemitism” along with any action criticizing the Israeli government.

The mafia state doesn’t want us to quit: it wants us to mutate as we navigate the dark. They want us so used to darkness that we lose the ability to see what lies ahead or notice the erasure of the past. That’s why I walk the caves lantern in hand, and appreciate the splendor that surrounds me, and know I receive this rare pleasure because I delve into the depths with an open heart.

Small talk, big adventures. All around the world, people do the same thing. All around the world, powerbrokers want to strip our small joys away.

They want to take everything, but I won’t lose myself. I would rather walk over the underground than have the underground walk over me.

* * *

Thank you for reading! I would never paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. That ensures every article remains open to everyone. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family of four, so I appreciate your support!

No Kings Allowed! All cave photos taken June 14, 2025.

A shadow of the past.

Told you Kimmswick makes a big pie!

The Kimmswick pie in rock form. Just kidding, it’s the cave again!