The most misused word in the American Lexicon
Well… the 4th of July is finally over. The United States of America is officially 250 years old. I question whether it can reach 275 years old intact. If not climate change killing massive numbers of us, then it could well be that Trump’s brand of fascism may very well destroy whatever goodness is left in this rapidly declining country.
But during the “celebrations” (e.g., Trump’s trailer-park county fair), I kept hearing the same word over and over. FREEDOM! Supposedly, the USA is the greatest country in the world because it has freedom. But do we really have freedom for everyone in this country?
The answer is no — and by any honest measurement, the United States is far less free than it was when the bicentennial occurred in 1976. I was alive for that Bicentennial, getting ready to embark on my third-class midshipman cruise aboard USS Paul F. Foster (DD-964). Today in 2026, the United States is classified as free, ranking 15th globally on the Cato Institute’s Human Freedom Index. The nation scores 81/100 in Freedom House’s Freedom in the World Report. And for certain classes of people, the numbers are far worse than those two metrics indicate.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Are immigrants being hunted down, jailed, harassed by ICE, and shipped off to foreign prisons free?
- Are school children who have to do mass shooter drills or citizens who feel compelled to own a firearm for self-defense somehow really free? How about the 44,447 gun deaths last year?
- Is a man or woman stuck working in a job they hate because they need health insurance and can’t afford to lose it free?
- Is a child in Texas, who is forced to sit in the shadow of the Ten Commandments or forced to read Bible verses, against the wishes of their parents, free?
- How about the pregnant woman, living in a place like Texas or Tennessee or Idaho or Oklahoma, who experiences a miscarriage or an ectopic pregnancy, free? Or is raped and forced to carry the pregnancy to term, somehow free?
- Is a young person now working in their first job, and saddled with a student loan that will take them decades to pay off, actually free?
- Is the person who goes bankrupt because of medical debt free?
- Or the husband who is slowly bankrupted by the theft of his retirement and support payments made to an ex-wife because of America’s flawed family court system. Are they free? In many cases, they become indentured servants.
- How about people like Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Julio Sosa-Celis? How about the lady who was hunted down by ICE and threatened with arrest for an Instagram post — in accordance with the First Amendment? What about the 37 deaths in ICE custody so far this year? They are not free.
- Think back to the time of the declaration. “All men are created equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights.” EXCEPT for slaves, Indians, and others. There were approximately 500,000 enslaved people in the colonies in 1776, out of a population of 2.9 million. Were men really equal?
- Think also of the period 1877–1965, the time of Jim Crow? How many Americans were denied their freedoms?
- Are people for whom the Supreme Court just green-lighted voter suppression based on race really free to vote for the representative of their choice? Or the people in districts that have been hopelessly gerrymandered.
- How free was I when a disgruntled member from my alma mater doxed me because they didn’t like my passionate hatred of Donald J. Trump? These supposed “honorable men” are doing that over and over again because of their love for the rapist felon-in-chief.
- How about the people threatened by NSPM-7? (a federal directive issued by the Trump administration establishing a whole-of-government strategy to investigate, disrupt, and prosecute organized political violence and domestic terrorism. The definition of “domestic terrorism” is so broad as to threaten anyone who doesn’t want to be MAGA.) How is that freedom?
- And finally, it is not freedom when the top 10% of citizens hold 60–70% of the total wealth in the United States. How free is someone when people are living paycheck to paycheck while the rich hoard resources? Are people really free when they can’t afford the housing they need? (One could do a whole post on how economic inequality is robbing people of their freedom.)
The list continues ad infinitum. The truth is, America was never totally free. Not in 1776, and it is still not truly free now. The difference is that we have the resources and the technology in the 21st century to make freedom for all possible. In the words of FDR,
- Freedom of speech and expression
- Freedom from want
- Freedom of religion
- Freedom from fear
Later in the same speech, FDR went on to specify six basic goals:
- Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.
- Jobs for those who can work.
- Security for those who need it.
- The ending of special privilege for the few.
- The preservation of civil liberties for all.
- The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress for a wider and constantly rising standard of living.
The last 18 months have shown that Donald Trump does not want anyone to have any of those things. And, he has the sycophants in each department working hard to carry it out. Every Freedom in the Bill of Rights in today’s America now has a caveat associated with it.
Freedom of Assembly? Yes, but….
Freedom of Religion? Yes, but… ( Especially if you are Muslim, Jewish, or of other religions besides evangelical Protestant).
Right to Privacy? Yes but…..
In 2026, in Trump’s America, every American “freedom” has either been reduced or directly attacked. Just this weekend, the President of the United States declared war on half of the nation’s citizens by saying:
The people who vote differently than he does are a greater threat than not just what happened on Sept. 11th, but also those other dark days in our history. “Communism is the enemy of free people everywhere, everywhere in the world. Never works. It’s the enemy of the Constitution. Above all, it’s the enemy of July 4th, 1776. It is the enemy indeed.”
He called it “death, tyranny, and the pursuit of evil.” He said communists “don’t love God and they don’t want God.” He called it “an ideology of mass theft, mass control, mass lies, and mass murder.” And then he delivered the line that revealed what this entire speech was building toward. “You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”
Then came the threat:
“So on the eve of this 250th anniversary of American heritage, we resolve and swear for all to hear that the citizens of the United States of America will vanquish communism quickly. Don’t let them take too much of your time. You know they’re wasting your time, don’t you? But we’re not going to let them take too long or too much of our time as they play their games. and send them into exile. We will send them quickly away.”
These are the most dangerous words spoken by a sitting president in modern American history. This is not how the leader of a “free” nation behaves. These are the words of a tyrant who wants to crush any dissent.
Later in the speech, Trump laid out how he proposes to kill and exile people — literally. He explained how he intends to make sure his political opposition could never threaten his hold on power again. “We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms. If we are foolish, stupid, and unwise. But if we terminate the filibuster, as we should do, and immediately vote for the Save America Act, then we will not lose an election for a hundred years.”
And, implied in that statement is the idea that the party will implement any law he wants. A Trumpian one-party state will make the abuses of the Patriot Act look like child’s play. Trump wants you to know that unless you support him, you are an enemy of the country. And that he will deal with you accordingly. I am quite sure Trump did not write the speech; doubtless, the most evil people on his staff and at The Heritage Foundation wrote those words. It’s all an expression of their earnest desire to impose a one-party, minority government and theocracy on this country.
Tom Schaller noted quite correctly that folks like Russel Vought and The Heritage Foundation want to rewrite the Declaration of Independence. “By greedily attempting to expand and consolidate control over a nation forged by a Declaration and organized by the Constitution — neither of which he has probably read nor regards as sacred — Trump stains the founding documents. He believes in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but only for himself.”
“I have no doubt that what he said tonight is laying the groundwork to be used against people like me.” Truer words have not been written. The only question is whether the decent people in the country will be too lazy to fight back, or will they rise up to oppose the indefensible.
Many years ago, I wrote an article on American Exceptionalism, noting, as many other authors have, that the idea that America is somehow “different” is among the most dangerous self-deceptions we tell ourselves. I noted then, and still believe now, that
The key principle of American exceptionalism derives from the flawed premise that America’s ideals are unique to the country of America and are not resident in any other country on earth. That is clearly nonsense. America is a product of its own history and the European history that preceded it. One begat the other. Seeing American ideals and principles as unique to America is to erase the British building blocks of that tradition, as well as the French thoughts of the Enlightenment that are at the core of the thoughts and ideals of the founding fathers. Furthermore-embracing this idea that America is somehow gifted and unique is to ignore some incredibly ugly segments of our own history. That’s a bad thing to do-especially in our current context-where so many bad ideas are passed around as if they are factually based.
Furthermore, it is an arrogant proposition to state, as some of the more devout devotees do, that God has somehow “favored the United States” over other nations. If that’s true-what is says about God is not really good. It certainly does not square well with idea of an all loving God who loves all the people of the world on a basis of compassion for them as His children.
If America’s ideals are universal, they cannot be reduced to the ownership of one country. And our country’s actual history — as opposed to Tea Party mythology — is as flawed as many others. It ignores the intended and unintended genocide of those who already lived here, as well as ignoring our almost 100 year embrace of a concept such as slavery which was indefensible then-and certainly more so now. It also ignores the unique influence of some incredibly lucky events that kept the nation on a path of unity-when clearly the global trend was in the opposite direction. The simple truth is that America was very lucky-and its success had many fathers, but the path of the success was uneven at best. Our wealth did and does not now exempt us from making hideous national mistakes. The invasion of Iraq was one such mistake, as is our current misguided intervention into what is essentially an internal matter in Libya.
I wrote those words 15 years ago. The intervening years have seen this country fail repeatedly and allow the worst elements of our society to come to the fore.
We are not a truly free nation at this point in history.
We are standing at a precipice. If we fall over it, whatever “freedoms” we enjoyed will be gone for decades. The time to fight back hard is now.