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| America at 250 |
By Isaiah Thomas
Board of Editors
Those of us around in 1976 remember the Bicentennial as a jolly, somewhat goofy affair that like most things that happened in the Seventies can be enjoyed as a somewhat embarrassing memory.
We were listening to The Captain and Tennille. We had disco fever. We played that funky music, white boy. We'd go on, but we can't keep breaking your heart.
Americans were in a partying mood. We had narrowly staved off the collapse of American democracy in 1974, thanks to incontrovertible taped evidence of Tricky Dick Nixon's corruption and criminality. The President was the relatively harmless and good-natured Gerald Ford, who seemed destined to be defeated by an affable Southern peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter.
So we had a good hot fun American summer with fireworks, barbecue, and cocaine. It was the Seventies, ffs.
No one in those innocent days could imagine that a 30-year-old repulsive nepo baby lounge lizard who creeped on Eastern European “supermodels”, i.e. whores, would avoid jail and rise to become President, not once but twice.
Which brings us to our current plight.
At the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we are in thrall to a tyranny far more oppressive and corrupt than the one that led the colonists to break away from the supposedly tyrannical King George III.
All three branches of our Government are in the death grip of a Republican plutocracy that makes the pre-Civil War Slave Power seem almost benign by comparison (unless you're an enslaved person of color, that is). The rule of law has crumbled, as the regime indicts its critics for comments made in seashells. The Republican-dominated Supreme Court just this week made it clear that it was one vote away from repealing the Fourteenth Amendment, a re-establishment of our nation baptized in the blood of 360,000 loyal American soldiers.
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| Fight like this guy... |
Our 18th Century Framers, in their wisdom, sought to protect their new nation from tyranny by distributing power into three branches. After 50 years of unceasing agitation by the rich and racist, their scheme crumbled into dust.
The Congress, narrowly dominated by extremist Republican nonentities who owe their political survival to their President, has failed to protect the Constitution they swore to uphold. It has authorized or acquiesced in every assault on our nation and our liberties, from putting the Justice Department at the disposal of a criminal Executive to wiping out centuries of progress in public health to letting a ketamine-demented plutocrat bring death and agony to hundreds of thousands of helpless people by undoing Congressionally-appropriated foreign aid.
Meanwhile the Republican-bent Supreme Court (but not to their credit the trial-level Federal judiciary) has transformed, contrary to the Constitution's text and structure, the law-bound Executive into an all-powerful king free of any checks on his power, no matter how crazy.
Contrary to the Constitution, the Court gave the President immunity from criminal liability for acts committed as President. As a result, the current tyrant commits crimes with impunity, because he knows he can. Just this week, those same bent Justices, supposedly in the name of democracy, gave the President unlimited power to fire members of almost all independent agencies, despite the decision of the democratic branches, repeated time and again over 100 years, that such quasi-judicial agencies deserved a measure of autonomy.
Fortunately, as with the revolt against the supremacy of the Slave Power in 1860, there has been resistance. We are fighting back.
But we suggest taking a lesson from the greatest warrior in American History, General U.S. Grant. When the Slave Power tried to break the United States by force of arms, many Northern worthies thought that the rebellion would be quickly extinguished by a modest degree of military action and what we would call today “bipartisan cooperation.”
It didn't work out that way. The Confederates were serious about destroying their country to protect slavery. They would die and kill lavishly for their cause.
Grant knew that the response would have to be overwhelming and ceaseless:
Unlike McClellan, Grant would pursue a policy of “desperate and continuous hard fighting,” inflicting massive casualties and applying unrelenting pressure.
R. Chernow, Grant at 356.
After the Confederacy had surrendered, and the white racists respawned (which is where we are today), Grant had a similar reaction to a coup against the Reconstruction government of Louisiana:
To Grant, it looked as if the country might be lurching toward a second Civil War....Grant's crisp, decisive actions stopped an insurrectionary movement in its tracks.
Id. at 762.
Which brings us to where we are today. Like Grant, if we have any hope of vanquishing the despoilers of our democracy, we have to understand the enemy.
Mayor Mamdani's remarks are a good place to start:
Mamdani: "As we mark 250 years ... we see the wealthiest country -- one where children go to sleep hungry while the world's first trillionaire hungers for more ... we see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans"
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) July 3, 2026 at 10:26 AM
[image or embed]
In some ways, our tyrannical adversary is more powerful than the Confederacy. In other ways, it resembles the pre-secession grasp of the Slave Power that dominated all three branches of the Government.
As mentioned above, all three branches have largely marched together in replacing our democracy with a new white racist kleptocracy. In this enterprise they have been aided by powerful private forces.
The first is the plutocratic control of the means of communication. Since Inauguration Day 2025, formerly powerful and independent media voices like The Washington Post and CBS have become mouthpieces for tyranny. CNN, soon to be owned by the same reactionary skillionaires who swallowed and ruined CBS News, is likely to follow suit.
Formerly open social media networks, like Twitter, Tik-Tok (owned by the same guys who destroyed CBS), and Facebook are now censored and dissenting views algorithmically suppressed because their owners seek to curry favor with the regime or, like Twitter, are under the control of a neo-Nazi ketamine-demented trillionaire who illegally destroyed USAID.
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| ...not this one |
Those same heartless plutocrats continue to spend billions to nobble the democratic process, overwhelming the marketplace of ideas with dark and dirty money. In this enterprise, they have been aided by the Republican Supreme Court, which for decades has equated money with speech, as if there is a First Amendment right to scream into a megaphone so immense it drowns out all other speakers.
Finally, there is a powerful network of white bigots, sometimes pretending to espouse Christian values found nowhere in Christian Scripture (or anyone else's). Their hate endangers not only people of color, but also women, immigrants, LGBTQ persons, and anyone who stands in the way of their effort to pervert America into an intolerant anti-intellectual wasteland.
Only by knowing our enemies can we defeat them. They rule not principally by force of arms (although Renee Good and Alex Pretti may beg to disagree) but by their interlocking control of all levers of power, government and private. Therefore, violence is not justified Nor is it likely to succeed. Rather the opposite.
Instead total war must be waged on all fronts. The 2026 elections are a place to start, because taking back Congress would in effect cut off one of the tyranny's most powerful tentacles.
The 2028 election becomes even more consequential. We must elect not just a Democrat, but one who is committed to a full agneda of restoring democracy. That means junking the filibuster, radically reforming the Supreme Court with new judges (or opening membership to lower court judges selected by lot for a particular case), term limits, and limits on their jurisdiction.
It means conditioning appropriations on purging the Executive Branch of corrupt depraved scoundrels. It means reforming the Department of Justice so that it is free to pursue criminal matters at the discretion of merit appointees, not unqualified political hacks and nitwits.
It means pushing back on media capture, starting with x'ing out X.
It means rebuilding the regulatory state so that fraudsters and plutocrats (and their failsons) can no longer manipulate markets with impunity. Sorry, Eric.
It means withdrawing tolerance from racists and whackjobs and demanding that universities stand up for traditional academic values, like free inquiry.
It means focusing on state governments, which have proven to be to tyranny what cruise ships are to norovirus: incubators of fatal disease. No one wants to think about state government, but the capture of states by white racists and plutocrats has proven to be a potent threat to democracy everywhere. If you don't believe me, you're not a poor 19-year-old teenager in McAllen, Texas in desperate need of medication abortion.
It mean ceasing to take seriously clown pundits pushing a falsified narrative that both sides are at fault because someone once yelled at some dips*** judge at Stanford. Same for Harvard-Dalton douchebags counseling moderation because they are supposedly in such close touch with the hopes and dreams of America's heartland voters.
Will this work? We don't know. Grant may not have been sure that the Union Army would win, but that didn't stop him from exerting every effort toward victory.
The current tyrant is historically unpopular and polling suggests this may be a good year for Democrats. But it's a damned close-run thing. Here's the current status of Senate races:
The fight for American democracy rests on a knife's edge.
It reminds us that the final pillar of support for the second (or third) coming of the Slave Power is the thus far unshakable support of tens of millions of white racists who enjoy watching the daily performance of white dominance and cruelty emanating from the White House.
They are the folks who interpret “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as nothing more than white supremacy and cheap gas.
Are there more of us or more of them?
We won't know unless we fight, like Grant's Army, on this line all summer.
As Andrei Navalny, who sacrificed his life to free his country from an even more powerful and loathsome tyranny, reminded all of us: “You're not allowed to give up.”
