On Our Nation’s 250th Birthday

It was indeed a strange Independence Day this year. There you were, having a picnic, perhaps going to a parade or beach, and if you had the inclination, you might have thought about the momentousness of this day 250 years ago when a group of men in Philadelphia summoned the courage to take a perilous leap-- declaring to the king of England that we were no longer all in on his empire, that we were embarking on a bold new experiment called democracy, and we were breaking away. It was a literally revolutionary set of principles they declared on July 4, 1776: they, --we, would no longer tolerate the old aristocratic social order, an inherited rigid system of class and wealth; and all human beings had natural rights, and we no longer consented to be ruled by a government that crushed these rights.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles...” 

 A beautifully clear and simple declaration--and how applicable to our present situation. At the same time as we enjoyed our picnics and celebrated the Fourth, the spectacle of the current fascist regime with its jaw-dropping corruption and lies colored everything. Just the night before, King Donald had delivered one of the most radical and dangerous speeches of either of his presidencies, declaring that the Democratic Party is made up of communists; he promised that communists would be sent into exile, and outlined a plan that he said would ensure Republicans “will not lose an election for a hundred years.”

Political commentator Heather Delaney Reese calls his Mount Rushmore speech “a declaration of political war against half the nation. And it was not subtle. It was not coded. He said it out loud, word by word, and what he laid out is a plan to dismantle the United States of America as we have known it, and rebuild it in his image.”

The speech began with exceptionalist excess, glorifying the unique greatness and power of the United States. Trump framed it in pure Christian nationalism, proclaiming that this nation belongs to one faith, one tradition, and one set of people.

“Yet, as we approach this magnificent anniversary,” he said, “we see our American identity under renewed attack a generation after we fought and won the Cold War against the menace of communism. There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success.”

Trump stood at Mount Rushmore and said that the people who think differently from him are a greater threat than just about anything in our history, including two world wars and 9/11. He said communists “don’t love God and they don’t want God.” He called it “an ideology of mass theft, mass control, mass lies, and mass murder.” He made clear who is in this dangerous group, in addition to all Democrats: “illegal immigrants, criminals, and everybody that doesn’t want to work.” And then he got to the clincher statement. “You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”

Then his speech lost all pretentions to be about the nation’s 250^th anniversary. “We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms. If we are foolish, stupid, and unwise. But if we terminate the filibuster, as we should, and immediately vote for the Save America Act, then we will not lose an election for a hundred years.”

As Heather Delaney Reese writes, “This is not a celebration of America. This is the end of it, if he succeeds. This is McCarthyism. In the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy used the communist label to destroy the careers and lives of Americans who disagreed with him. He held hearings designed not to find truth but to force loyalty oaths.”

Careers were indeed destroyed, families were ruined, it took years to restore trust among neighbors and in workplaces. But there’s an even more worrying difference between McCarthyism and Trumpism: the fomenter of the Red Scare in the 1950s was a mere crackpot senator who terrorized the nation for about four years; this time it’s the President, and he has built tremendous power, with two more years to go and loyalists who will continue after he’s gone. McCarthy did not build a private army of thugs; this President has. McCarthy didn’t have all three branches of government in his grip, Trump does. We can only hope that Trump’s new strategy, absurdly invoking that very old saw of communism as the supposed enemy, comes from so far in left field that it won’t work in 2026.

He brought communism up twice again last night in his big militaristic July 4 speech in DC,  and it simply seemed puzzling. But it’s sure to grow into key raving point in his rallies from now on.

On July 3, New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani gave an Independence Day eve speech as well.  A Ugandan-born naturalized citizen who came to New York at the age of seven, Mamdani was seen sitting at George Washington’s actual desk, surrounded by recently naturalized citizens holding American flags.

He said, “Those ideals upon which our nation was built, they are strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them.”

“For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best,” he said, echoing Trump’s own language.

“America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit. How small they are. How weak, how unoriginal.”

And then he said: “It is precisely because we love this nation that we will not leave it.”

Trump called immigrants a communist menace. The same day, an immigrant gave a more patriotic speech than the president. As Heather Reese says, “Trump sees America as something to be owned and ruled over, a bloodline reserved for a chosen few. The real America, though, has always been an idea, shared, strengthened, and passed on by every generation willing to believe in it enough to build it.”

With his robust moves toward voter suppression and his new anti-communist talk, Trump is laying the groundwork for the midterms and for what he imagines as the 100-year regime of Trumpism. His speech is about manufacturing fear and hate.  His ever-tightening control of the media, of history, of elections, of truth is reaping rewards and we need to be fully aware of how his propaganda is twisting vulnerable minds.

There’s a viral video out, showing a Kentucky Baptist church’s Bible school that staged a mock execution of an immigrant, or some other “devil,” and the kids are encouraged to watch and cheer. The adults are training the kids to hate violently, just like them. This is an inevitable product of Trumpism. In the video you can find on the Internet, four men dressed in military gear and packing long guns drag a man in front of a crowd of screaming, laughing children.“Take him out! Blow him up!” the children shout among much merriment. It is chilling.  

This sort of education in cruelty is happening not just in Kentucky. Trumpist hate and encouragement of violence is everywhere, including here in Poulsbo. A fireworks stand has just popped up next to the Gateway megachurch, and its big sign reads Baptist Boom. ICE is ramping up big time in Kitsap, snatching twenty-one more people in Shelton last week, and making their presence felt in Poulsbo, Silverdale, and Bremerton.Yesterday in DC, four hundred masked members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front marched through Capitol Hill in anticipation of the July 4 parade (which didn’t occur due to the extreme heat).

The fact that they proceeded unimpeded causes us to wonder how a group of Democratic Socialists calling for, say, universal health care would fare on the same route. How many would be arrested, incarcerated, charged with who knows what crimes in Trump’s America?We need more Mamdanis, more sanity, more and louder truth-telling, more of YOU, more people to rise up in the spirit of democracy. It’s happening, slowly. For example, a group is forming here to strategize ways to provide legal help to detained immigrants. And we all know it’s soon going to be more than immigrants that are persecuted, because the Communists are everywhere...

We need more courage, more open peaceful protest, more pressure on elected officials. Because as we’re seeing time and again, authoritarians back down when there is loud outcry. We need you, everyone, to do more than you’re doing. Contact us about signing up to get active. Get your neighbors to stop clutching their pearls and wringing their hands and instead, urge them to get off the couch and do something to protect the vulnerable and protect democracy. Don’t treat our rallies like church, where once you’ve joined you’ve done your duty: no, it’s time to ACT, to sign the declaration of independence for—literally--our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

.