Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The US experiment has failed. It’s failed from sea to shining sea. Democracy, liberty, and equality for all are just dreams some of us have. The ones who could care less about that dream were and are mostly among the wealthiest in the population. Amber waves of grain are nothing but numbers on the commodities exchange. They have their followers among the rest, but it is their money that gives them their power, not their supporters. The fact that most of its founding fathers never intended for that experiment to extend beyond white men with property has a lot to do with that failure. The fact that the entire premise was based on the taking of land from other humans has a lot to do with that failure. The fact that millions of those whose land was taken were slaughtered is more often denied than acknowledged is equally crucial to that failure. The fact that enslaving millions for the benefit of the few is also crucial. The fact that democracy has been defined as the right to vote is also related to that failure. As we watch the court they call supreme eliminate voting rights for those who weren’t originally granted them (including the descendants of those whose ancestors were killed and enslaved), even the pretense of democracy fades into the ruins of the White House lawn. Ladies, your right to vote is next to go.

This government hyped (with a straight face, mind you) as the world’s greatest democracy sells its gold-plated gimmicks for the benefit of the con-man they call the president. He’s a man whose health remains a question and whose humanity reminds the world that humanity can be a pretty ugly thing. In fact, this entire nation—from the Delaney ICE detention camp to Mar-A-Lago, from the UFC ring on the White House lawn to the data Centers across the Midwest—reminds one of that fact. Pete Hegseth’s gelled hair competes with Gavin Newsom’s, both of their swelled heads filled with emptiness, greed and a self-centeredness surpassed only by the white supremacy their power depends on and protects.

It’s nothing new. The Trump administration may be the worst many have seen in their lifetimes, but it is truly unique only in its brazen disrespect for the rules the powerful pretend to play by. Then again, the opposition party’s actions and words are mostly just echoes of the hatred and ignorance espoused by the party in power. Democratic rulers claiming to be against Gestapo forces known as ICE demand they unmask themselves while providing those same forces with backup when protesters block ICE kidnappings. When all is said and done, when Donald Trump is gone, ICE or some other named Gestapo force will carry on its work with the support of those in power. Kidnapping and torture in the name of democracy and freedom aren’t much different than enslavement and genocide in the name of the Republic for which it stands. The nation is a burial ground, and the intruders are the ones who make it so.

I visited Florida recently and was struck by the gross commercialism of the so-called 250^th birthday party. I shouldn’t have been, but I was. Even for Florida, it was over the top. After all, the only true freedom in the US of A is the freedom to make a profit, and if you ain’t got the money, then the rulers don’t have the time for you. I’ve been told that all freedom stems from that one freedom; if people can’t make a profit from you, then no other freedom exists. Of course, the ones telling us this are the ones making that profit. Then again, there are a lot of others who think they’re going to get their piece, too. Ring your bell, fly your flag, pocket your profits, drink up, and pay your bills. One nation under profit, with freedom for those who can buy it and debt slavery for the rest. Blame the homeless for their poverty and give the war industry your tax dollars. Blame the people the Pentagon attacks for their suffering and glorify the troops whose bodies your nation’s wars have destroyed. Thank you for your service, and put that pricey gas in your big-ass truck or budget SUV. Somebody died for it. Speaking of Florida, when I go there, I think it must be what it was like for visitors to 1930s Germany, with Nazis on the rise and a population either supportive or apathetic. Of course, it’s a particularly US version of the phenomenon—with right-wing bikers and racist suburbanites who have Fox News on 24-7—but it’s fascist no matter what colors are on the national flag.

The event being celebrated in the United States this July 4^th wasn’t a revolution as much as it was a war by settler-colonialists against the king who enticed the colonists to go to North America and chase its inhabitants from their lands. The colonists weren’t fighting for freedom in any manner most of us claim to understand it. However, it was so that wealthy white men could own, buy and sell Africans and their descendants as slaves and so that religious zealots could enforce their particular insane version of faith on others and kill indigenous people after classifying them as less than human. When all is considered, it’s clear that the only true god was the one who brought gold. The colonists didn’t want to pay taxes to the crown because the wealthy among them wanted those taxes for themselves and their wars of expansion. Don’t let the giant flags at your local car dealer fool you, the burial ground those wars created are reconsecrated in blood and oil each time you pay at the pump. Don’t buy the cheesy display of roids and misplaced masculinity on the White House lawn and think you’re celebrating freedom. Freedom to be an asshole is freedom of a sort, but the fact that it is celebrated as a virtue in 2026 proves only that assholes rule your nation. It’s another thing you can thank Donald Trump and his devotees for.

Indeed, one thing we can be thankful of in these years of national decline is the presidency of Donald Trump. In its own vainglorious way, his reign proves that money, no matter how it is obtained, is the only true god in the USA, and the more you steal, the holier you are. All others bow to its glory. Its power is in its ability to render empathy, trust, and truth the stuff of fairy tales that shall remain fantasies as long as the pursuit of profit and power in the name of more profit remains the god to which all other churches bow.

Let freedom ring.

(This is excerpted from Operation Failed: The United States at 250, the newest pamphlet in Fomite Press’s Instigations! Series)