Chris Hedges: Independence Day Drag

 What a wonderful article by a Presbyterian minister. 

Thank you, Chris Hedges. — Molly

Diva Don - by Mr. Fish

I spent the Fourth of July with some of the few 

sane people left in the United States: Drag queens.

By Chris Hedges

FIRE ISLAND, New York – I am on a boat with 100 drag queens who are traveling from the gay enclave of Cherry Grove on Fire Island to the neighboring community of the Pines. They have staged this “invasion” every year since 1976, after a drag queen was denied service at a restaurant. Incensed by the discrimination, a group of 17 drag queens from Cherry Grove piled into a water taxi and traveled to the Pines before storming the restaurant.

The invasion is part political statement, part party. But in the age of Trump, when drag queens, people who identify as transgender, immigrants, feminists, people of color and the so-called radical left are demonized and targeted, the invasion is at once outrageous and poignant. It captures the best of the United States of America — what it means to be a patriot and what compassion, individual liberty and a civil society looks like.

If I was going to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday, it could only be here.

“Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP,” Trump posted on Truth Social last year, later announcing he would allow “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA.”

Former Miss Fire Island 2022, Zelina Duval, is wearing a topaz sequin gown, stiletto heels decorated with rhinestones and huge flower droplet earrings with a matching ring and bracelet. She has an auburn wig and long, black false eyelashes. Like the other drag queens, she instantly sees through Trump.

“Trump’s a queen,” Zelina says. “We all know. He wears makeup, bronzer and highlighter. He has a new costume every day.”

“Our founding fathers wore wigs, heels and makeup,” says Paige Monroe, dressed in a champagne sequin gown, a honey-blond wig, rhinestone earrings and redolent in Cap Camarat perfume. “Drag is nothing new. It has been with us since the beginning of time. In ancient Greece and Japan, men played women’s roles.”

Trump’s gaudy ballroom, his smothering of the Oval Office in gold leaf and gold ornaments, his finicky concern about the color of his drapes, his penchant for old show tunes, his love of the gay national anthem “Y.M.C.A” by the Village People, his 1950s aesthetic of men in dark suits and black Florsheim shoes and his Mar-a-Lago women, whose surgically enhanced bodies sport huge breasts, puffed up lips and taut death masks, could be transferred to any of the evening drag shows held next door to my hotel at the Ice Palace.

The shows are very loud. They often don’t end until 4 a. m. The hotel staff leave ear plugs on the nightstand. It helps. A little.

During this Fourth of July weekend there was an “underwear dance party,” where in the morning, blurry eyed men told me their underwear swiftly became optional. There was also Alaska Thunderfuck’s “Fourth of July Alien Invasion Party.” Alaska sang selections from her albums “Anus” and “Poundcake.” Songs included “Your Makeup is Terrible,” “This is My Hair” and one song, whose refrain, repeated over and over, was “I fucking love you.”

The frequent sexual liaisons — the Ice Place has a curtained off area for those who want immediate and often anonymous gratification — mirror the promiscuity of the Epstein Class, but with one important difference: Epstein’s girls and women were trafficked and enslaved. Here, relations are consensual.

Fascism is an inverted form of camp. Its evil side. It is devoid of irony and humor. It takes itself seriously. It uses exaggerated, theatricalized art to turn a leader — like any drag queen — into a larger-than-life persona. The outward forms are the same. But fascist camp is about instilling obedience. Drag queen camp is rebellious. Drag queen camp seeks to expand human possibilities and identities. Fascist camp crushes identities into narrow, state-approved molds of good and bad, man and woman, patriot and traitor.

“Trump doesn’t know its camp,” says Bob Levine, who arrived in Cherry Grove in 1955 and has been performing for 70 years under his alter ego, Rose Levine. He was one of the original 17 drag queens who invaded the Pines. At 93, he is still performing. His next show at Cherry Grove Community House and Theatre is on July 11. It is the oldest continually operating gay summer theater in the country.

He was here in the 1960s when police sent undercover officers to entrap gay men. Once arrested, the men’s names were published in the papers. Most were fired from their jobs.

“So many lives were destroyed,” Levine says.

As rights are rolled back, as all who do not conform to the Trump administration’s rigid definition of what it means to be a man or woman are attacked, the darkness of the past becomes that of the present.

Thom Hansen, known in drag as “Panzi,” is dressed as the Statue of Liberty. She wears a long green gown, has a towering white wig with a crown and a small torch. In 1976, Panzi was one of the drag queens who stormed the Pines.

As our boat enters the harbor at the Pines, hundreds of people line the docks. They clap and cheer. Docked boats let out loud blasts. Sirens wail.

A singer in shorts wearing red, white and blue socks on the dock sings “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” He changes the lyrics to, “My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the queens.” When he closes with “The queens are marching on,” the crowd erupts in sustained cheers.

Panzi, disembarks. She stands on the pink carpet rolled out on the dock. She grips a microphone. Signs in the crowd read: “We will not be erased.” “We the People Means Everyone.” “Drag sets our imagination free.” “Fuck Fascists.” “Fuck ICE.”

“The invasion was founded because someone here in the Pines did not allow a trans woman to dine in a restaurant,” she says to the crowd. “That’s all history. We all love each other, well, most of you anyway. If you have phones on, if you are recording this, send these recordings to our little trans brothers and sisters in fucking Texas, Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota and Washington because they are alone. They need to know we are there with them. I will fight until I die for their freedom and mine.”

The crowd roars in appreciation.

“I love you Panzi,” a man screams.

“I love you too!” Panzi replies. “Are you pretty? Do you have a big dick?”

The drag queens who disembark are announced to the onlookers. There is a group of men dressed as “trad wives.” They have brown and blond wigs and matching beige dresses. There are crosses dangling from their necks. They are holding wicker baskets and are wearing straw sun hats. There is a group of drag queens who call themselves “America’s Sweethearts,” carrying blue pom-poms and dressed in blue and white cheerleader outfits. There is a drag queen in a short green skirt with a sash that reads, “Best Ass.” A group of men in shorts wear white hard hats with the words “Trad Repair.” Sophya Medina, Miss Fire Island 2025, wearing her sash and crown, disembarks to sustained applause.

“I keep praying that the administration and the policies will change,” Panzi tells me later. “Everybody is praying for that, but nobody wants to do anything. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand why the immigrant community doesn’t rise up. Why don’t the Black and Hispanic communities rise up? Why don’t ethnic communities rise up? Everybody is quiet. The LGBTQ community is quiet. If we all get together and rise up, it might mean something. But people are terrified. In my day we were rebels. We fought. We burned cars, for God’s sake. We broke windows. But nowadays, I don’t know. They are rolling us back to the 1950s.”

There are many here who have been rejected by their families and communities. For them, gay enclaves such as Cherry Grove are like oxygen.

“Why can’t we have a country where it’s just okay to be yourself?” asks Basit Noor, an oral surgeon who moved to New York from Pakistan after repeated death threats. “Why should anyone feel endangered for being themselves if it’s not hurting anyone? We fought for our rights. We fought for our freedoms. We fought for where we are today. If this movement stops, we won’t have a place to be who we are. We get tired, like ‘Oh my gosh, when is the change going to happen?’”

The melancholy is a constant theme.

“Back in 1984, I was 15 years old,” says Flaggarina Ivanna Diamond, this year’s Cherry Grove Homecoming Queen. “I was on a ninth-grade field trip at Sailors Haven’s Sunken Forest. One of the boys points to Cherry Grove. I didn’t know anything about Cherry Grove. I didn’t even know it existed. At that time I’m this closeted gay, teen boy. And there’s a lot of homophobia at the school. The boy says ‘Watch out, those guys, they’ll grab you.’ I’m praying as hard as I can, ‘Oh please grab me, please grab me, please grab me.’ And after all these years, Cherry Grove did grab me. It grabbed my heart.”

Fascism is not only a poisonous political movement. It is a poisonous cultural and social movement. It eliminates the space for those who do not submit to the narrow definitions of what it means to be a citizen, a man, a woman or a patriot. It ruthlessly crushes independent lives and identities. It leaves in its wake loneliness and trauma. Fascism begins with the marginalized and demonized, but it does not stop there. It destroys community after community until we are orphans in our own land.

I wanted to be in my country on July Fourth before it disappeared.

Please go here for the original article: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/independence-day-drag

EXCELLENT — 'United States Has Wedded to Idiocy': Chris Hedges | Talk to Al Jazeera

This is an excellent interview with Chris Hedges that I highly recommend to everyone. I am convinced that it is essential for increasing numbers of us to become deeply aware of the peril that we are in. May these truths inspire us to join together in growing solidarity to do everything that we possibly can to dismantle the neoliberal fascist systems which threaten our nation and all life on Earth. In quoting James Baldwin, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." — Molly

I highly recommend the work of Chris Hedges to everyone.

By Chris Hedges

As the United States marks 250 years of independence, author and journalist Chris Hedges reflects on the promise of the American experiment, its greatest achievements, and its deepest contradictions.

Please go here for the original: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/united-states-has-wedded-to-idiocy

EXCELLENT — Dr. Stacey Patton: This Fourth of July Photo Is America’s Whole Lie in One Frame

 

Photo: Members of Patriot Front ride the Metro as a commuter looks on during the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence, July 4, 2026. REUTERS/Cheney Orr.

Hey Y’all,

I usually don’t write commentary pieces this late at night. But I had to.

Right now, fireworks are cracking and blooming across the country with all that ritual noise of American self-congratulation. But I want you to pause for a moment with me because I stumbled across this photograph that stopped me cold. I want Y’all to look at it with me because it captures America at 250 years old in one frame.

Here is a lone Black woman sitting on a DC Metro train minding her business and trying to get to wherever. She is locked inside a moving metal tube, surrounded by masked white supremacists. They are standing over her, above her, and around her with their arms raised to the handrails. Their bodies fill the aisle and their covered faces are turned into an anonymous wall of threat.

This image is terrifying. It frightens and it should.

Because a lone Black woman trapped in a subway car beneath the raised arms and covered faces of racist degenerates is ancestral. It calls up every mob, every train platform, every “whites only” car, every night ride, every courthouse lawn, every public space where Black people were reminded that America’s freedom has always come with a warning label. But the photo also begs us to look past fear. It begs us to study the contrast.

So let’s do it, shall we?

She is seated, still, unmasked, unsmiling, and looking directly into the camera with the exhausted clarity of an old soul who has seen this country before. The composition is almost too perfect in its cruelty. She is the only fully visible face in the image.

They cosplay courage beneath face coverings, sunglasses, caps, patches, uniforms, little symbols, little flags, little costumes of counterfeit masculinity. She gives the photograph its humanity, and they give it its stench. She is not just sitting beneath their arms. She is sitting beneath the whole sour weight of American history. The musty armpit of white grievance. The body odor of Empire. The stale sweat of pathetic white men who want to rule a country they are too cowardly to show their faces in.

And look at the train itself. Public transportation is supposed to be a shared civic space. A place where strangers are supposed to coexist under the ordinary terms of democracy. Sit, stand, commute, mind your business, go home. But MAGA America has made even the mundane feel occupied. A subway car looks like a plantation corridor and this commute looks like a gauntlet. A Black woman sitting quietly becomes the visual center of a national emergency.

This is not just a photograph of white supremacists on the DC Metro. This is a photograph of what it feels like to be Black in a country that keeps on insisting its violent past is “over” while its descendants board the train in matching outfits.

And the timing matters. It’s the 4th of July. America’s birthday. The annual festival of flags, fireworks, grilled meat, and historical amnesia. A day when the country congratulates itself for “liberty” while Black folks are expected to clap politely from inside the afterlife of slavery. It’s a day when white America recites “all men are created equal” with potato salad in its mouth while masked racists march through the capital because equality has always offended them. This photo tells the truth that the holiday tries to bury.

This young Black woman’s face is the answer to every lazy person who says, “Why do you always bring up race?” Because race keeps boarding the train. Because race keeps wearing masks. Because race keeps organizing, marching, legislating, policing, threatening, and then pretending it is merely “patriotism.”

Because this is what MAGA America has done. It has dragged the country’s underbelly back into daylight and called it national pride. It has given the losers of history permission to rehearse victory. It has turned white resentment into pageantry. It has taught soft little men that if they put on a uniform and hide their faces, they can feel powerful for an afternoon.

At the center of all that white insecurity and fear sits a Black woman whose stillness is more powerful than their entire performance. She is not smiling for the camera. She is not playing respectability politics. She is not pretending this is fine. Her face says: I know exactly where the fuck I am. I know exactly who the hell these bastards are. I know exactly what this country is.

That is what makes the image so devastating. Not because she looks afraid. She doesn’t. Because she looks unsurprised. That is the national shame. That a Black woman can sit surrounded by masked white supremacists on Independence Day in the nation’s capital and the most haunting thing about her expression is not shock but recognition.

America keeps asking Black people to celebrate its birthday while making us sit beneath the armpits of its original sin. And somehow, after all that, we are still the only ones in the picture with our faces uncovered and looking like human beings.

These white men are not “patriots.” Patriots do not need masks to love their country. These are scared little white boys dressed up in the fantasy of conquest because equality feels like humiliation to them. They are the spiritual descendants of every mob that ever hid its face and every coward who ever needed a crowd before he could feel like a man.

They want us to believe they are powerful. But the photograph betrays them. They are hidden. She is exposed. They are costumed. She is real. They are a mob. She is a witness. And that is the thing America should fear most. Not the masked white men standing over her, but the Black woman sitting beneath them, seeing everything clearly, and refusing to disappear.

— Dr Stacey Patton

Please go here for the original article: https://drstaceypatton1865.substack.com/p/this-fourth-of-july-photo-is-americas

Dr. Stacey Patton Exposes the Neoliberal Heather Cox Richardson's "Sticky Little Problem" Related to the Fourth of July

Thank you Stacey Patton! Ever since Heather Cox Richardson supported Hillary over Bernie and tried to say that misogyny was the big reason people weren’t favoring Clinton, I knew that she was a neoliberal and full of sh*t. She pissed me off then and pisses me off today — and especially because too many people can’t see through the poisonous neoliberal propaganda she spews. Which makes her dangerous. Thank you Stacey for illuminating the shadow side of HCR and speaking the truth! — Molly

I was curious to see what Heather Cox Richardson would write about today.

Not surprisingly, she is doing the classic liberal historian move, which is trying to rescue America's founding by treating slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and women’s exclusion as tragic "contradictions" rather than constitutive features of the American project.

Look at this phrase she uses in her piece: “the sticky little problem of Black and Indigenous enslavement”

Sticky little problem? Seriously?

Slavery was not a “sticky little problem.” It was THEEEE economic, political, legal, and psychic foundation of the country these men were building. You can't sit there and call the Declaration of Independence “astonishingly radical” while treating the exclusion of most human beings as some damn parenthetical inconvenience.

Basically, her big argument in this piece is that America was founded on equality, betrayed by reactionaries, redeemed by civil rights struggle, and now its all being threatened again. She's saying, yes, the Founders had blind spots, but the idea was radical. Yes, America excluded people, but eventually Americans expanded the promise. Yes, we are in danger now, but we can return to our better angels.

Listen, America was not merely founded on “the radical idea that all men are created equal.” America was founded on a RACIALIZED EXCEPTION CLAUSE hiding inside that sentence. The men who wrote “all men” did not accidentally forget Black people, Native people, women, the enslaved, the colonized, the poor, or the propertyless. They built a political order where equality could be proclaimed precisely because inequality had already been naturalized. Let's start ffs!

And look at this soft line from Richardson: “Americans began to expand the idea that all men are created equal to include Black men, men of color, and eventually women.”

No, girl.

Black people FORCED the issue. Indigenous people resisted extermination. Women organized, sued, marched, got jailed, and fought their way into the polity. This was not America gradually becoming generous. This was America being dragged, screaming and kicking by the people it excluded.

Her piece is a nice comforting civic sermon. It is meant to steady liberal readers on July 4 and remind them that democracy has a lineage that's worth defending. But it is too damn reverent and forgiving. It's too invested in preserving the founders as these flawed prophets instead of naming them as the evil degenerate architects of a republic that made freedom and racial domination grow from the same damn soil.

At the end of the day, Richardson and other liberals wants to say America is betraying its founding principle. I disagree with all of them. America ain't betraying shit. America is returning to one of its founding habits, which using the language of freedom to protect the machinery of white rule.

Richardson and others keep arguing that MAGA is a rebellion against America’s founding promise. Nope again. MAGA is what happens when the people written into the founding finally panic that the people written out might take the sentence seriously.

This kind of liberal patriotism is so irksome and dangerous because it keeps asking us to defend the myth at the exact moment we need to be dismantling the machinery!

Read her piece here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-3-2026

— Stacey Patton 

https://substack.com/@drstaceypatton1865

Chris Hedges: Requiem for America on the Fourth of July

For decades Chris Hedges has been the canary in the mineshaft warning us of where we are and what is to come if we don't act together to stop the madness and get off the suicidal trajectory we have long been on. Tragically, and because Chris is such a beacon of truth, he is never heard on corporate funded mainstream American media. I grieve when I reflect on how profoundly different our nation and world would be if we were consistently exposed to powerful voices of truth, courage, integrity, and a deep caring for the well-being of all of life everywhere.

All this said, this latest piece by Chris Hedges is a hard read. And it is spot on. And I agree with Chris that "we must name our enemies this Fourth of July." We must. And this is yet another reason why I am moved again and again and again to illuminate what neoliberalism is — something that far too many Americans know nothing about, but which for decades has been seriously impacting us all.

I am also moved to quote one reader who summed up the essence of this article in a powerful comment: "This is the Fourth of July sermon nobody wants because it does not come with sparklers. Fascism did not fall out of the sky wearing jackboots. It grew in the empty factory towns, the gutted unions, the bought courts, the opioid funerals, the billionaire tax cuts, and the polite liberal refusal to name class war while people drowned. Trump is not the disease by himself. He is the infection that took over after neoliberalism shredded the immune system and then acted shocked when the fever arrived."

May we be inspired to embody the profound commitment to truth that has always been reflected in the work of Chris Hedges. He is a national and international treasure. — Molly

Bread and Bullets - by Mr. Fish

The con of neoliberalism has gutted our democracy and paved the way for fascism.

By Chris Hedges

Neoliberalism, better understood by its less sanitized term cutthroat capitalism, is the poison that destroyed our democracy. It gave the billionaire class and corporations the ideological cover to impoverish the working class, impose crippling austerity, hollow out democratic institutions, buy off our two ruling political parties and deform our courts into appendages of corporations and the rich.

Neoliberalism drove tens of millions of disenfranchised, desperate people into the arms of Christian fascists, who preyed on their despair and sold them the fantasy of magic Jesus. It drove them into the arms of conspiracy theorists and right-wing charlatans. It drove them down the self-destructive rabbit holes of alcoholism and opioid addiction, compulsive gambling, domestic and sexual violence. These were the inevitable consequences of personal stagnation, disempowerment and feelings of worthlessness, frustration and profound despair.

Neoliberalism ignores the cries of its victims. It dismisses their suffering and rage as irrational, ignorant and racist. It neuters liberal reforms, rendering them cosmetic and useless. Liberal apologists for neoliberalism, no longer concerned with economic justice, retreat into boutique activism. They mouth empty slogans about diversity and political correctness while pretending the relentless class war, unleashed globally since the 1970s, does not exist. The victims of neoliberal deindustrialization, 30 million of whom lost their jobs in the U.S. in mass layoffs, understand that the precarity of their existence does not concern their neoliberal masters.

Right-wing pundits and politicians, such as Donald Trump, who issue crude, vulgar and expletive-laden insults against the traditional neoliberal establishment are celebrated by the disenfranchised for exposing the political charade. These demagogues promise moral and economic renewal for the betrayed, albeit grounded in magical thinking.

Neoliberals peddle their own form of magical thinking. Neoliberalism is as absurd and infantile as the Christian Rapture and Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. Trump lies like he breathes, but so did previous presidents including Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Trump embraces fantasies, but so did they. Trump, like his Democratic predecessors, enriches himself and his family, although with far more ostentation and greed. He, like them, facilitates the ongoing pillage by the billionaire class. Trump is the fascist iteration of the neoliberal con.

Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite — the twelve richest billionaires own more wealth than the poorest half of the world — is designed to create massive income inequality and monopoly power. It is the antithesis of democratic equality. It is designed to fuel political extremism and foster social and cultural divisions. It is designed to hollow out democratic institutions. Economic rationality is not the point. David Harvey calls neoliberalism “accumulation by dispossession.”

As a ruling ideology, neoliberalism is a brilliant success. Starting in the 1970s, its Keynesian mainstream critics were marginalized or pushed out of academia, state institutions and financial organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The same is true of the media. Compliant courtiers and intellectual poseurs such as Milton Friedman or New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman were given prominent platforms and lavish corporate funding. They slavishly disseminated the official mantra of fringe, discredited economic theories popularized by Friedrich Hayek and the third-rate writer Ayn Rand.

Once the country was forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace, once government regulations were abolished, once taxes on the rich were slashed, once money was permitted to flow across borders, once unions were crushed and once trade deals were signed that sent jobs to sweatshops in Mexico and China, the world, these poseurs assured us, would be happier, freer and wealthier. It was a scam. But it worked. And it fueled the rival con game of the demagogues and fascists who were vomited up out of the moral and political morass.

The media bears much of the blame. In the name of objectivity, better understood as neutrality, it absented itself from the class war. It did not investigate the mounting abuses of the rich, corporations or its bought-and-paid-for political class. It did not expose the absurdity of neoliberalism. It rendered the victims invisible. By shutting themselves out of the debate, the media, a vital pillar of any democracy, neutered itself. It too became despised.

Individual freedom, which neoliberalism holds up as the highest good, and social justice are not compatible. Social justice, Harvey writes in “A Brief History of Neoliberalism,” requires social solidarity and “a willingness to submerge individual wants, needs, and desires in the cause of some more general struggle for, say, social equality and environmental justice.” Neoliberal rhetoric is able to “split off libertarianism, identity politics, multiculturalism, and eventually narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of social justice through the conquest of state power.”

Neoliberalism, as Ece Temelkuran writes in “How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps From Democracy to Fascism,” exiles morality from public life. It isolates it in the private space of the individual. It corrals it into “the holding pen of religion” while religion is “clipped and cropped into market-friendly ‘spiritualities.’” Justice and mercy are no longer shared concepts. Personal and public morality are severed. How, she asks, “can we convince people not to commit evil in those realms of public life from which law enforcement is absent?”

“Humans,” she writes, “are incapable of functioning and living together without a good story to bind them and keep a certain set of values intact. That’s why the lack of a story in neoliberalism, the lack of meaning and cause, can be unbearable for the human mind. Since humans are forced to live in a state of mild antipathy — an acceptable amount of antipathy that is crucial to the neoliberal system — they are forever in dire need of a cause, a central triangulation point that they can use to orient themselves in relation to what’s good and what’s bad. The ethical vacuum of neoliberalism, its dismissal of the fact that human nature needs meaning and desperately seeks reasons to live, creates fertile ground for the invention of causes, and sometimes the most groundless or shallowest ones.”

Karl Polanyi in “The Great Transformation” distinguishes between bad freedoms and good freedoms. Bad freedoms are sacrosanct under neoliberalism. They permit the powerful to exploit workers and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse. Pharmaceutical and health care corporations, for example, jeopardize the lives of those who cannot afford their exorbitant prices. The fossil fuel industry is driving us towards extinction.

Good freedoms — freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom of association, freedom to choose one’s job — are snuffed out by bad freedoms. The freedom of the many is transformed into the freedom of the few. The result is fascism.

Fascism uses the blunt instruments of fear, intimidation and violence to curb the mounting disquiet. It divides the country into warring factions — the patriots vs. the enemies of the state. It obliterates shared values. It champions the cruelty of hypermasculinity. Those who dissent are branded domestic terrorists. Civil liberties are abolished in the name of national security.

The 30- to 100-year sentences meted out to eight anti-ICE protesters in Texas, who were portrayed in court as an “antifa terror cell,” are being normalized. A ninth defendant, David Rolando Sanchez Estrada, was not present at the protest, but was sentenced to 30 years after being convicted of concealing documents when he moved a box of political zines and other materials. A second group of defendants in the broader Prairieland case were sentenced on July 1. Six who accepted plea agreements received prison terms ranging from nearly two years to 15 years, while Ines Soto, who rejected a plea agreement and went to trial, received 50 years.

The equation of civil disobedience with terrorism is routine in countries such as Turkey, Russia and India. It is being cemented into place in Europe. A British judge, in a ruling that mirrors what took place in Texas, recently sentenced four members of Palestine Action as terrorists, sending them to prison for five to nine years, even though they were neither charged nor convicted of terrorism offenses.

It does not matter if Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin or Nigel Farage disappear. The tens in of millions of people “fired up by their message will still be there, and will still be ready to act upon the orders of a similar figure,” Temelkuran writes. “And unfortunately, as we experienced in Turkey in a very destructive way, even if you are determined to stay away from the world of politics, the minions will find you, even in your own personal space, armed with their own set of values and ready to hunt down anybody who doesn’t resemble themselves.”

Our country, as we once knew it, no longer exists. It was methodically destroyed by neoliberal con artists. The institutions and legal protections that once shielded us from tyranny no longer function. Those who champion an open society are orphans, smeared as traitors, excoriated as the “radical left.” I mourn what we have lost. I mourn what we are about to lose. This social isolation will soon be physical isolation. We will be criminalized or driven into exile.

Trump and his fascistic cabal, epitomized by billionaires such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, are constructing a mafia state. A nation of gangsters and marks. A nation where they alone have unlimited freedom to pillage and exploit. A nation where the government is privatized. A nation where we are enslaved to corporate technology. A nation where we have no place.

We must name our enemies this Fourth of July. They are the fascists who have seized power. And they are those who, selling us the con of neoliberalism, put them there.

Please go here for the original article: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/requiem-for-america-on-the-fourth

Please go here for Chris Hedges' substack: https://substack.com/@chrishedges