When the Flashpoints Turn Into Firestorms
Legality is just wallpaper. The cracks are already spreading.
Filed under: Flashpoints, Civil Liberties, Authoritarian Creep
The streets are whispering what the headlines won’t.
It happened again, and barely anyone noticed.
On July 17, protesters filled the Roebling Suspension Bridge between Cincinnati and Covington with a banner that read: Build Bridges Not Walls. They were mourning Imam Ayman Soliman, an ICE detainee who also served as a chaplain at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. Police swarmed the bridge, ordered dispersal, and when protesters didn’t back down, thirteen people were arrested—including two journalists who were simply doing their jobs. A video surfaced, after, of an officer beating a protester senseless while others screamed.
That was one bridge. One protest. One city.
But it wasn’t an isolated incident.
The Pattern We’re Not Naming
New York City saw arrests outside its immigration court. Los Angeles saw over five hundred people dragged into custody across scattered protests. San Francisco, Austin, Georgia, Santa Ana—each with their own flare of resistance, each one handled with the same playbook: escalate, overwhelm, and silence.
These are flashpoints: sudden, burning eruptions that could die out quietly or spread like wildfire. And yet the national conversation acts like each one is a disconnected spark. “Local disturbance.” “Failure to disperse.” “Unlawful assembly.”
Call it what it is: coordinated suppression.
The National Guard Question
The quiet dread in the background isn’t about police in riot gear. It’s about when the Guard shows up.
Traditionally, governors control their state’s National Guard. In emergencies, the President can federalize them—an Insurrection Act loophole that has been stretched and abused before. That means red state troops could be deployed on blue state soil, or worse, against citizens in D.C.
And what if the reverse happens? What if California or New York decide to send their Guard to defend protesters in Washington? Legally, it’s unconstitutional. But “legality” has become a magician’s trick. Trump’s administration has already proven laws are only as strong as the institutions willing to enforce them.
At that point, we aren’t talking about protest management. We’re talking about open constitutional crisis in the nation’s capital.
Legality as Wallpaper
People still cling to legality like it’s an anchor. He can’t do that. That’s illegal. The courts will stop him.
But law is not a wall. It’s wallpaper. Pretty until it peels. Fragile until water soaks through. And the flashpoints we’re seeing—the bridge arrests, the courtroom crackdowns, the LA raids—are the cracks spreading beneath the paint.
Pretending otherwise is self-delusion.
What Escalation Looks Like
Picture it: protesters march to D.C. carrying candles and banners. On one side of the street, troops flown in from Texas. On the other side, California or New York forces arriving in defiance. A standoff not between citizen and state, but between the states themselves.
The people in the middle—the ones chanting, grieving, demanding justice—become collateral in a rehearsal for civil war. And once rifles are pointed across the crowd, it only takes one nervous trigger finger to set history ablaze.
Why We Can’t Look Away
The Roebling Bridge is a perfect metaphor. Protesters tried to use it to connect two communities, and the state turned it into a choke point. Every “flashpoint” protest is like that: a fragile bridge between the comfort of daily life and the uncomfortable truth that authoritarianism is here, now, wearing badges and carrying guns.
Ignore enough flashpoints, and you wake up to find the bridge gone. The only way forward will be through the smoke of force.
Legality won’t save us. Silence won’t save us. Witnessing might. Resistance might. Naming the pattern before it calcifies into permanence might.
The flashpoints are multiplying. The wallpaper is tearing. And when the cracks spread wide enough, the wall will fall—whether anyone is ready or not.
Keeping detailed receipts,
—Rebecca M. Bell
[Self Proclaimed] Editor-In-Chief of the Literary Resistance
Filed under: Flashpoints, Civil Liberties, Authoritarian Creep