Author’s son on his bicycle in a 4th of July parade.
When it comes to America’s semiquincentennial birthday, I feel like someone whose husband has gotten fat and surly and announced he’s going vegan.
You just have to keep reminding yourself of those Good Old Days when he was a promising young poet and not promising riches with something called “financial products.”
So, I close my eyes and think back to those Good Old Days when America was young and handsome and did some pretty impressive stuff.
Let’s begin with, “All men are created equal,” which was pretty damn radical in human history. Yes, you can tell me that America never really lived up to those highfalutin words, but by 1865, we the people proved we meant it.
Half a million Americans died in a war to end slavery.
Can you name one other nation on this planet where white people sacrificed their blood, as a nation, to end enslavement of Black people?
And please spare me the sophomoric cant that the Civil War was about something other than human bondage.
An axiom of historians is that those who know nothing about the Civil War believe it was about slavery; those that know a little about the Civil War think it was about something else like economics; but those who have studied the Civil War know that it was, indeed, about slavery
As my fave progressive historian Eric Foner stated,
“No narrative of the Civil War can ignore the centrality of slavery to its origins, conduct and legacy…. Indeed, the abolition of slavery, an indisputably moral exercise of national power, gave new meaning to Jefferson’s description of the United States as an ‘empire of liberty.’”
How cool. But after Gettysburg, came a century of racial darkness…
…Until the Battle of Pettus Bridge at Selma, Alabama, in 1965. On that bridge, an army of freedom fighters, un-armed and never even raising their fists, were beaten bloody by an army of hatred. Yet, in that Mighty Battle, the forces of all-men-are-created-equal overcame the violence and won Thomas Jefferson his last victory as a civil rights warrior.
Go ahead and take a shot at Jefferson. I know: he kept his baby mama in legal bondage. And at the same time, he was a committed abolitionist. In the original Declaration of Independence, Jefferson listed slavery as an inhuman evil forced on America by King George. (It was the only paragraph struck from the Declaration by the Continental Congress.)
Jefferson educated his Black children in his home but never gave them equal status to his white kids. Notably, one of his Black grandchildren, Col. John W. Jefferson, commanded the 8th Wisconsin Regiment for Abraham Lincoln.
And that sums up what makes America the Beautiful and America the Ugly at the same time; our internal contradictions, our big-shot words about equality while, at this very moment, the one and only privilege of American citizenship, the right to vote, is truly facing horrific new threats.
This Fourth of July, Trump will hold a deep-fried bacchanal in his pathetic attempt to highjack America’s birthday into a MAGA-bration. They are selling pretzels stuffed with a hotdog and cheese. Now, how do you get a hotdog to wiggle into a pretzel? Only in America!
We can laugh at the rubes who show up despite getting fleeced by Trumpcoin. But here’s why laughing hurts: it’s who is NOT there for this gross display of fake patriotism, who is clearly not wanted at this ethnically cleansed rodeo — you and me.
But We the People are there. From the ground beneath the mullet-haired TrumpFest. From underneath the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool Swamp. From the Navy ships in the Gulf where our kids are waiting on death by drone in a war that we already “won.” From the suburb where a mom is sick at heart because her Affordable Care Act premiums tripled and her kid has MS and she’s ready to do something about it. You can hear it.
You can hear it in the canyons closed to Americans because of DOGE budget cuts. You can hear it if you listen carefully to a sound that’s barely there, barely alive.
It’s the sound of freedom ringing.
A great Jewish poet once wrote: “Send me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I lift my lamp beside the Golden Door.”
Has any other country on this planet ever raised a Statue of Liberty to that welcome?
Two hundred fifty years ago, a crazy group of outlaws declared No Kings Day. From that day to today. No Kings now and forever.
Caption for additional image: Author keynotes No Kings Day rally in San Diego on October 18, 2025. Flag in case adorned the coffin of Gladys Palast, a Coast Guard veteran. Image: Martin Eder 2025 for PIF and KNSJ Radio.
That’s worth celebrating, isn’t it?
Greg Palast is an investigative journalist. His not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund is launching a series of 6 reports on vote suppression — and how we can reverse it — in coordination with our partners at Black Voters Matter Fund, the NAACP of Georgia, Transformative Justice Coalition and the late Rev. Jesse Jackson’s RainbowPUSH.
