Many would attribute our grotesque celebration of 250 years since our founding to the tacky and garish personality of Donald Trump. A man who has never met something he can’t redesign to make it look more like a strip mall spa under investigation by the health department or a French aristocrat’s bathroom from the late 1800s.

But that would be shortsighted and put far too much blame on one consequential but ultimately limited individual rather than where it should squarely rest, on all of us. Just as Trump is a symptom not the cause of the rot of the Republican Party, the United States of America at 250, is a symptom of the sins that started accumulated before our founding, and that we have consistently failed to address.

Sure, a different President might not have built a steel cage for bloodsport on the White House lawn. But the deep moral and ethical rot of the Republican Party would still be deeply entrenched in Washington, DC, just without the obvious lightning rods for dissent. But it’s not just Republicans, it’s the Democrats who continue to let them steer the discourse, and justify working across the aisle.

While ICE gets chased out of Starbucks, and pushed to stop shooting drivers, local police continue to murder our neighbors with impunity. And it happens in blue states and red states. And neither party wants any part of addressing it.

While we fight immigrant detention centers opening around us, we continue to incarcerate our neighbors at world outlying rates. Even other countries that we criticize for jailing political dissidents or othered populations can’t match our per capita rates of locking people away from their communities, their families, and our society.

Our newly elected Democratic Governor in NJ campaigned on increasing solitary confinement, and against police accountability that leads to inflated charges and feeds the prison industrial complex. All while trying to appear on the right side of history by opposing private prisons.

Our founding was a revolution against troops occupying our streets. Against taxes going toward violent oppression and enriching the few. Against locking up those trying to change things for the better. And yet some of our brave patriots, dumping tea in the harbor, dressed as indigenous people, because they were easy to redirect anger and consequences toward.

So we must continue to have memory, and hold people accountable. While it’s important to move politicians, it’s also important to challenge them in primaries. We don’t have to forgive our leaders for throwing groups under the bus, even if they change their mind. We can still consider it a character flaw to have to be dragged kicking and screaming to do what’s right, to support our neighbors, to refuse to join in the othering.

We’ve been told for years that our country, even the blue parts, is hostile to our Black neighbors, women, LGBTQIA+. It’s time to start listening.

Reading

Family of woman shot by police suing Fort Lee, police over 2024 killing by Sophie Nieto-Munoz

The Lee family lawsuit accuses Fort Lee police of excessive force, warrantless entry, and civil conspiracy, and alleges Lee’s killing represents a violation of the federal Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act. It says the borough’s dispatch policy automatically sends multiple armed officers to any call involving an “emotionally disturbed person” with no option to send a mental health expert, while medical calls receive paramedics and no police officers. That policy denied Lee an opportunity to obtain the same result provided to callers without mental health disabilities who seek assistance from 911, the complaint says.

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The complaint alleges that Pickens, the first officer to arrive at the Lee apartment, spoke to the family in an “accusatory tone.” Five more officers arrived in the hallway outside the apartment within minutes, and the officers “hurriedly decided” to break down the door, the complaint says.

“Pickens replied right away, ‘I’ll go less lethal,” the lawsuit states.

When the officers opened the door, they found Lee holding a small knife. Officers loudly yelled for her to “drop the knife,” but the lawsuit claims they did not give Lee a chance to do so.

“Within three seconds of breaking open the door, Pickens shot Victoria point-blank in the chest from a few feet away,” the lawsuit says.

The haunting question Black Jerseyans are asking as America celebrates 250 years of freedom by Ande Richards

Little speaks quickly, his answers arriving with the cadence of someone accustomed to rallies, public meetings and organizing. Even when discussing history, he sounds focused on what comes next.

To him, freedom remains unfinished.

“It looks like Black people being freed from the shackles of mental and physical slavery and healing generations of trauma,” he said. “Our plight is to free our kin from those shackles and to abolish systems that were created to steal, kill and destroy Black lives.”

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Reflecting on the Declaration of Independence as the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, Lundy said she sees freedom as an unrealized ideal — one that requires honesty, accountability and action.

“As I began meeting descendants of Europeans in the cemetery and thinking about the Declaration of Independence and the fact that we were approaching the 250th anniversary, I kept coming back to the idea that Black people and white people need to have a conversation,” Lundy said.

She said the conversation starts with three questions: “Are we there? Do all of us in this country have that freedom? The answer is no. Second, do we think everyone should have it? Hopefully, the answer is yes. And third, what are we going to do about it?”

What, to the American Incarcerated Person, Is Your Fourth of July? by Martin Garcia, Aala Abdullahi, Beth Schwartzapfel, Rebecca McCray, Annaliese Griffin, Nicole Lewis, Brittany Hailer, Louis Fields

As a modern-day American slave — because that’s what I am, thanks to a loophole in the 13th Amendment that still allows enslavement as a punishment for crime — July 4th is full of heartache, embarrassment and disappointment. It’s also a cruel reminder of how the criminal legal system is violating my 8th Amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment.

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And as a Black woman behind these walls, I have the same protection against sexual abuse that my enslaved great-grandmother did: little to none. After all, the Trump administration recently terminated all funding for the National Prison Rape Elimination Act Resource Center, painting targets on our backs for predators in uniforms. With insufficient — and in some facilities, zero — mandatory documentation for in-custody pregnancies or assaults, the message is clear: It’s open season on incarcerated women.

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What is freedom to America’s modern-day slaves? A one-man cell? Additional phone time? Purchasing a few extra candy bars at commissary?

What, to the American Incarcerated Person, Is Your Fourth of July? | The Marshall Project

In the spirit of Frederick Douglass’ historic speech, 20 currently and formerly incarcerated Americans explain what Independence Day means to them.

“Do You Understand Your Own Language?” by Robin D. G. Kelley

Revisiting “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” underscores the need for a critical and informed response to the spectacle barreling toward us, whether it is coming from MAGA propagandists or patriotic liberals who still believe we are on the path toward a more perfect union. Black studies has long challenged right-wing and liberal mythmaking, even at the expense of criticizing our own heroic icons. For example, Douglass’s fury over the hypocrisy of the Declaration is accompanied by a vigorous defense of the U.S. Constitution as “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT” thoroughly opposed to slavery. His insistence that slavery was unconstitutional and contrary to natural law misjudged the foundational role of enslavement, racism, and dispossession in the birth of the Republic — what the late philosopher Charles W. Mills called “the Racial Contract.”

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The Declaration’s significance extends far beyond the aims of the American Revolution or an expression of American nationalism. For Black thinkers, captive and fugitive, it was a referendum on the definition of the human, a rhetorical weapon against America’s conceits of liberty and democracy, and an exhortation on the right to rebel. Black people did not need a document to justify revolt, but it came in handy. It is most powerful when the people it was never meant to represent grab hold of its language and toss it back like an undetonated grenade, whether those hands belong to Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Maria Stewart, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam. For these and other reasons, the Declaration should be read as a core text in Black studies.

“Do You Understand Your Own Language?”

Black radicals read the Declaration of Independence.

America 250: A Reckoning by Josh Caress

What if the whole appeal of MAGA is that it activates our foundational American identity? What if the “originalists” on the Supreme Court—invoking ideas “deeply rooted in our history” as they overturn abortion rights and voting rights—are simply reasserting the fundamental structures the country is based on? What if this nation founded on genocide, extraction, slavery, patriarchy, and white supremacy is simply doing what it has always done—what it was built to do—despite some brief interludes when its power was diminished? What if denying this reality is only giving them more power?

The real story of American progress was never one of fulfilling our destiny, but rather the natural response of oppressed human beings fighting against an imposed, unsustainable fantasy. Every movement for liberation in the United States—Indigenous sovereignty, abolition, labor rights, women’s rights, Black civil rights, LGBTQIA+ rights—has been waged directly against the foundations of what this country is, and every time, they have been accordingly met with the force of the state. Have you ever wondered why we’re never shocked to see violent cops in riot gear anytime marginalized people even peacefully assert their human dignity?

While liberals claim heroes like Martin Luther King, they forget that King and the Civil Rights movement were treated as domestic enemies by the US government, even under Johnson. Every Black-led movement since has been heavily surveilled, infiltrated, and had its leaders smeared, imprisoned or killed. Liberals love to remind us that America “defeated the Nazis,” without acknowledging that Hitler claimed inspiration from both our genocide of Native Americans and the apartheid South of Jim Crow.

America 250: A Reckoning

Mythologizing ourselves to cover atrocities

‘We were attacked as bad Jews’: Columbia faculty who supported Gaza protests file claims with Trump’s antisemitism fund by Alice Speri

Howley wrote in his complaint that since speaking in defense of his students in the early days of the protests, he had been subjected to endless harassment, as well as disciplinary charges over his role mediating between student protesters and the administration. “We spoke as Jews about the University and how we thought it should protect its interests; we were attacked as Jews, or as bad Jews, or as fake Jews, by people who carried the University’s authority or knew they had its implicit support,” he wrote.

“This singling Jews out for special treatment is dangerous and encourages antisemitism,” said Howley. He said he felt he had an obligation to draw attention to the climate at Columbia because Muslim and Arab colleagues were not given the same chance.

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Some of the people who filed claims on Tuesday said the university did nothing to protect them and in some cases contributed to the hostility. Several noted that after two dozen Jewish faculty members signed an April 2024 letter condemning the university’s response to student protests, Columbia’s antisemitism taskforce falsely claimed in a report that they had called “for an end to the state of Israel”, listing the faculty’s names in a footnote and prompting a torrent of abuse against them. (The taskforce later edited the report but issued no apology or retraction, and the old version continues to circulate.)

Many of the employees who filed claims described being called “kapos”, “Nazis”, “Hamas sympathizers” and “self-hating Jews”.

“My Jewishness demands that I honor my ancestors and the only way I know to do that is to oppose war, violence and injustice and fight for ‘never again for anyone’,” Marianne Hirsch, a scholar of antisemitism and the daughter of Holocaust survivors, wrote in her claim. She cited the Jewish principle of tikkun olam, or repairing the world, as a reason for her speaking out. “When the only acceptable way to be Jewish is to support Israel unconditionally, there is no longer a way for me to be Jewish on Columbia’s campus.”

EY Zipris, an adjunct professor at Columbia’s Teachers College who was raised in a Hasidic ultra-Orthodox community, wrote in her claim that her parents, including her Israeli mother, opposed Zionism on religious grounds. “Had my profoundly observant parents voiced those same perspectives on Columbia’s campus today they would have been called antisemitic and pilloried for their beliefs, just as I have been for mine,” she added. “I was on numerous occasions insulted, belittled, and verbally attacked for standing publicly and unapologetically as a Jewish American, often while holding signs in both Hebrew and English calling for the safety of students and colleagues.”

‘We were attacked as bad Jews’: Columbia faculty who supported Gaza protests file claims with Trump’s antisemitism fund | Columbia University | The Guardian

Faculty who support Palestinian rights are applying for compensation, claiming they faced harassment as Jews for their positions

Tucker Carlson's Latest Foray Into Far-Right Antisemitism Flies Under the Radar by Ben Lorber

The other cruel irony of this moment, on full display in reactions to this week’s Democratic primaries in New York, is that too many within the Jewish world and beyond still view leading lights of the Left like Zohran Mamdani or Hasan Piker as chief purveyors of antisemitism in America—or at least as close equivalents to political leaders and streamers on the Right. As usual, most of the ‘evidence’ assembled here amounts to spirited criticism of Israel or groups like AIPAC.

Hard-edged, unvarnished antisemitism can be found if you look long enough, to be sure, but there is simply no equivalent to what’s happening in MAGA, where the movement’s leading platform proudly features age-old deicide charges and caricatures of Passover as a ritual of tribal bloodlust from an ‘expert’ who points his finger squarely at ‘international Jews’.