Category: Opinion

A few months back, the Donald Trump-fried chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, urged broadcasters to air patriotic programming for America’s 250th birthday — including regular on-air recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance.

I couldn’t find any reports about TV or radio stations that have actually done this. Maybe they’ve figured out that the bit at the end — that stuff about “liberty and justice for all” — has been rendered into utter baloney by Carr’s strongman boss.

For anyone who still believes the myth that the United States’ criminal justice system is the envy of the world, I say: Let them come to Fort Worth. In northern Texas, a crime committed by one man with the “wrong” politics gave the Trump regime the ammunition it craved for a free-speech crackdown that makes a mockery of America’s birthday bash.

Ironically, it was on July 4, 2025, that a crew from the small but tight-knit left-wing community in the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) metroplex ventured 30 minutes south to the Prairieland Detention Center run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to protest the squalid conditions and overcrowding there.

The protesters dressed in black; some brought fireworks or medical supplies. The evidence shows they committed some minor crimes — vandalizing a vehicle, for example. But when local police were called, one man — Benjamin Song, an ex-Marine known to local activists as “Champagne” — committed a serious offense, firing a gunshot that wounded a town police officer in the neck. The officer later acknowledged he was pointing his gun at a fleeing protester when Song fired his weapon.

The Prairieland incident came right as the Trump regime was striving to brand “antifa” — a loose ideology that fascism should be resisted by any means necessary — as some kind of highly organized terrorist cell. FBI agents fanned out across DFW, ultimately building a riot-and-terrorism case against nearly two dozen leftists, including the group — now known as the Prairieland 9 — that stood trial this winter at the Fort Worth federal courthouse.

Among the evidence prosecutors presented to bolster their contention that the protesters were part of some kind of terror cell included their black garb, their Signal chats in which they discussed plans for a “noise protest” at Prairieland, or their decision to bring medical supplies with them to the demonstration, which occurred at a time when anti-ICE protests were meeting violent responses. One of the alleged coconspirators wasn’t even at the protest; he’d moved a box of anti-fascist magazines before agents visited his home after his wife called from jail.

Tamera Hutcherson, a local activist who attended much of the trial as a paralegal for defendant Savanna Batten, told me by phone Saturday that the case against Batten “was based on the fact that she showed up to the protest wearing black, she had medical supplies on her, which included a tourniquet, and that she was there for a noise demonstration to set off fireworks.”

Batten, Song, and the other seven were convicted in March, and their sentencing was decided by the trial judge — Mark Pittman, a Trump appointee — and his colleague, Reed O’Connor, a federal jurist so well known for his right-wing rulings that the Trump regime and allies like trillionaire Elon Musk look for excuses to bring cases before him.

In this case, O’Connor was happy to say the quiet part out loud: that a repressive government is seizing on this case to send a message to anyone who wants to aggressively protest mass deportation or other abuses. He called the protest “an assault on democracy,” adding, “The need to deter this type of conduct is high.”

Still, courtroom observers were stunned when the sentences came down. It wasn’t a total shock when Song, convicted of attempted murder, was given 100 years, but Batten, the black-clad medic, got 50 years — a virtual life sentence for dissent — as did several others. Daniel Sanchez Estrada, the magazine mover, got 30 years.

Hutcherson, who was in the courtroom for last week’s sentencing, called O’Connor’s comments “chilling … to have the judge say this out loud, it really sunk in.”

What’s sunk in is that the federal government is pouncing on the Prairieland 9 convictions to unleash a crackdown on left-wing protest that will make America’s past sins like the Palmer raids, McCarthyism, and the trial of the Chicago 7 look like child’s play.

In recent days, we’ve seen federal charges against the Minneapolis 15 protesters who monitored the Minnesota ICE raids in Signal chats, and an indictment against two Atlanta protesters against the “Cop City” police training center — even after a local judge had essentially laughed state charges against them out of his court. When a state prosecutor offered evidence of criminality that the Cop City demonstrators wore black clothes and masks, Judge Robert Flournoy said, “Oh, that sounds like ICE.”

There’s a lot going on here. The Trump regime — which last fall designated “antifa” (again, not an actual group) as a terrorist organization, abusing its vast post-9/11 powers as many of us feared it would — is aggressively clamping down on the First Amendment-protected right of dissent ahead of the November midterms, when its dictatorial-minded leader will stop at nothing to keep his party in power.

But these 50-year prison sentences, which carry the sauerkraut stench of German cooking, circa 1933, are also an exclamation point on the death of even pretending there is anything resembling impartial criminal justice in America. We are now a land where left-wing dissenters will spend decades behind bars reading about the latest millionaire fraudster or Republican apparatchik to get out of jail free.

Look, we’ve always been more than delusional about praising U.S. justice as the supposed envy of the free world despite the reality that rich kids or celebrities like the late O.J. Simpson who hire the best lawyers can walk free after people die, and white-collar crime is treated as a sport, while Black, brown, and poorer defendants form the backbone of one of the planet’s highest incarceration rates.

But the Prairieland most-of-your-life sentences didn’t happen in a vacuum. They are the counterweight to Trump’s Day One pardons for the roughly 1,500 right-wing rioters on Jan. 6, 2021, who stormed and vandalized the U.S. Capitol in an insurrection blamed for five immediate deaths, with more than 140 police officers injured.

And that’s not all. Trump has individually pardoned and granted clemency to well over 100 or so others in his second term — including just about every high-ranking Republican who’d been convicted of a federal crime, big-time donors to his political campaigns, or those who hired the president’s friends for big bucks.

At the same time the Prairieland 9 were getting frontier justice, the New York Times reported that Trump’s Justice Department quashed a criminal probe into the circumstances behind the president’s clemency for a multimillionaire named David Gentile. The private equity executive had been sentenced to seven years in prison and ordered to pay $15.5 million in restitution for a $1.6 billion scheme that defrauded small investors. Many lost their life savings — arguably a greater harm than anything that happened at the Texas ICE detention center.

But Trump granted clemency to Gentile after just two weeks in prison. Prosecutors were looking into the relationship between Gentile and a retired priest from Queens who has become a top supporter and personal friend of Trump and who lobbied the president for Gentile’s release. But higher-ups reportedly told New York mid-level prosecutors to end their probe into questions like whether the priest was paid.

In a matter of months, Trump has exploited the existing cracks in the federal justice system to make it a blunt instrument of personalist dictatorship — a “purge” for his criminal friends or bad guys willing to make a donation, while depriving those who dissent of their liberty.

I’m just barely scratching the surface, as Trump’s injustice department also conducts high-profile investigations into law-abiding political opponents, including top Democrats or people like former FBI chief James Comey. Or consider this: No action has been taken against Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who’s been publicly identified as the killer of unarmed Minneapolis motorist Renee Good. When a Syracuse, N.Y., woman ID’d Ross and asked why he had not been indicted in an Instagram post, federal agents entered a voting place where she was working as a poll worker and ordered her to take the inarguably true post down.

The nation’s founders, who declared American independence 250 years ago this week, strongly believed that justice was the backbone of their experiment in democracy. The Bill of Rights they’d enact in 1791 is largely about the right to a fair trial, avoiding unlawful searches and seizures, and the essential liberty of protesting an unjust government. More than two centuries later, the White House seems more governed by George Orwell’s 1984, as they criminalize left-wing “thoughtcrime.”

“I think it’s very symbolic … that this protest happened on the Fourth of July,” the Texas activist Hutcherson told me. “This year is the 250th year of America being America. And when we think about the inception of this nation, it was because of protest; it was because of dissent. And so it feels very contradictory that because someone has leftist or anti-fascist views that now they can be deemed criminal or a terrorist to the U.S. government. You know, we’re not seeing the same energy given toward people that have right-wing views.”

The firecrackers of dissent that went off on Independence Day 2025 over an ICE gulag in Texas were much more of a tribute to what America was supposed to be than whatever Trump detonates over his morally empty National Mall on this July Fourth. In a United States with liberty for billionaires and justice for none, what are we even celebrating?

As we approach the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, I can’t help recalling my 1999 visit to the Central Asian republic of Turkmenistan, whose dictator had a fetish for white marble architecture decorated with gold.

As I drove around the dusty capital of Ashgabat, it was impossible to escape Saparmurad Niyazov’s face.

It was emblazoned on banners hanging from government buildings and appeared on every denomination of paper currency. Statues of the dictator (I learned there were more than 2,200 of them in a country of 4.2 million people) loomed all around the city. The oil fields of this desert backwater funded Niyazov’s whims. Much of the country’s budget went into his private slush fund — all while he slashed resources for healthcare and renamed the months of January and April after himself and his mother.

What sticks out most vividly among my memories, as President Donald Trump turns our nation’s Semiquincentennial into a celebration of himself — festooning government buildings with huge banners of his face and holding a political rally on the mall Wednesday to kick off July Fourth events — is Niyazov’s arch.

The three-legged arch, sitting in the center of Ashgabat, supported an observation tower that, at 226 feet, soared higher than the nearby presidential palace. The structure was topped by a 36-foot gold plated statue of the Asian potentate that rotated constantly to face the sun. Perhaps if the planned 250-foot high “Arch de Trump” ever gets built, and blocks the view of Arlington National Cemetery, the face on the gold winged figure atop the memorial will look familiar.

It seems all dictators and wannabes have the same instincts: to build grandiose monuments of marble and gold, the bigger the better, in order to impress their subjects with their magnificence. Back in Ashgabat all that seemed bizarrely amusing. Whoever thought it could happen here?

Instead of honoring the country’s founding values and documents in this year’s celebrations, Trump is performing like a wannabe Niyazov of Turkmenistan.

The main point of the Declaration of Independence was that governments “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,” i.e., the people. The 13 colonies were quitting the British Empire because they refused to submit to a monarch who tried to rule by decree, rather than respect the elected representatives from the colonies.

Trump, who disdains any restraints on his powers and wants to rig election rules so they guarantee GOP victories, is turning the meaning of the Fourth of July on its head. I find it personally painful how this distortion has changed attitudes toward the United States all around the world.

For decades I’ve reported on the struggles of other countries to achieve the kind of free elections that most Americans have taken for granted for decades. I had the privilege of bearing witness to struggles for some form of democracy in the Soviet Union and China, in new post-Soviet nations, during the 1980s upheavals in the Philippines and South Korea, during the Arab Spring revolts, in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, and during the post-Taliban interval in Afghanistan.

Those who struggled for the right to choose their leaders often paid a terrible price. More often than not, their struggles failed or have been reversed after brief periods of freedom.

Throughout those struggles, the U.S. election system was a lodestar – even though reformers abroad may have opposed specific U.S. foreign policies or the U.S. exercise of overweening power. That admiration was especially evident in the ’80s and ’90s inside communist countries that were trying to break away from their past.

Russians listened to Voice of America (now nearly shuttered by Trump) and would eagerly query me about U.S. politics on my yearly visits to Moscow during those decades.

In 1989, I shadowed then-President of the Soviet Republic of Russia Boris Yeltsin for a day when he visited the room where the Declaration of Independence was adopted inside Independence Hall. He asked the National Park ranger how the American colonies apportioned power between states and central government after independence. I realized only later that he was preparing to take Russia out of the Soviet Union and wanted tips on how the Founding Fathers managed their exit from the British Empire.

In May 1989, Chinese students erected a 33-foot-tall Goddess of Democracy statue in Tiananmen Square inspired by the Statue of Liberty. I was in Poland at the time, observing that country’s first free parliamentary elections on June 5 that were won by Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement. But on June 4, I watched with horror on television, along with Polish colleagues, as the Chinese army sent tanks into Tiananmen Square.

Yet, despite hundreds to thousands of deaths (the exact figure is still unknown), Chinese democrats didn’t give up. In the 1990s, I reported on their efforts to press the central government to permit village, and then town, elections. I interviewed law students at top universities who traveled to small villages to instruct peasants on their rights according to Chinese laws that were ignored by officials.

This progress has been totally reversed by China’s hard-line dictator Xi Jinping, who also crushed democratic institutions in once autonomous Hong Kong. But as recently as 2023, it was inspiring to hear Hong Kong high schoolers, who were protesting the ongoing crackdown by Beijing, recite from memory their rights under law as they had learned in civics classes. Since then, such classes have been banned, and students must memorize rote lessons on “patriotic education” or “Xi Jinping thought.”

It saddens me now to hear self-exiled Russian liberals or Hong Kong democrats or visiting Chinese who once worked for some form of democracy at home, express shock at Trump’s attacks on America’s democratic institutions and efforts to rig elections. Repeatedly, I get the same questions expressed with genuine bewilderment: Why isn’t it possible to stop him from doing this? How is it possible that this can happen in the United States?

Ukrainians, who have fought bravely for more than four years to save their independence from Vladimir Putin’s imperialism, ask me how a U.S. president can back a dictator who hates the West, and wants to restore the Soviet empire. As Independence Day approaches, POTUS continues to ignore the parallel between Ukraine’s courageous struggle for freedom and ours long ago against the imperial British.

Europeans have given up on Trump, and I understand why, having watched Vice President JD Vance at the 2025 Munich Security Conference praise far right, neo-Nazi parties and demean Europe’s democracies. Trump, Elon Musk, and other MAGA acolytes continue to support extremist Europeans whose values would make the Founding Fathers gag.

So it isn’t surprising that a new Pew Research Center poll reveals a steep decline in the popularity of the United States worldwide, especially over the past year. Only a median of 37% of adults polled across 36 countries hold a favorable opinion of our nation. Only 23% express confidence in Trump’s leadership of world affairs, ranking him behind Putin and Xi.

But what is even more striking is that only 39% believe the U.S. government respects the personal freedoms of its own citizens. This is how the world now views a country that was once seen as a beacon of democracy.

During July Fourth celebrations across the country, in places far away from Trump’s pollution of the capital, I hope Americans will reflect on what the Founding Fathers bequeathed to us 250 years ago. For inspiration, reread the Declaration of Independence and brainstorm with friends, colleagues, and family on how to prevent the president from desecrating its principles at the polls come November.