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