Frederick Douglass’ July 5, 1852 speech unfortunately feels very appropriate this 4th of July. While the subject of Douglass’ speech is the hypocrisy of celebrating an Independence Day in a nation that still practiced chattel slavery, this passage speaks loudly to the present:

“your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are … mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”

Some time this afternoon, the president of the United States will sign legislation that will further shred an already-inadequate social safety net to the tune of over $1 trillion in order to fund more tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. Some 17 million Americans are projected to lose their healthcare coverage so someone can add a new McMansion to their real estate holdings or another Gulfstream to their fleet. The same legislation will fund the goon squad known as Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) to a level higher than all but 15 countries on earth fund their entire military. Some of the same people who cheered both the idea and the brutal reality of mass deportation will see the rural hospitals they depend on for healthcare shut down due to these cuts.

Earlier this week, the DeSantis administration in Florida opened a concentration camp in the Everglades funded with money intended to help Florida recover from natural disasters like hurricanes. Now the Trump administration no longer has to outsource its abuses of civil rights and liberties to El Salvador—they can do all that right here. Nancy Mace of South Carolina has written to DHS to advocate for a similar domestic gulag in her state.

The SCOTUS assault on the 14th Amendment that began with allowing an insurrectionist to stand for election last year, continued with their decision to make citizenship itself subject to the whim of the executive, rather than the plain text of the amendment or over a century of precedent. Numerous GOP politicians up to and including Trump have threatened and/or advocated for the arrest, de-naturalization, and deportation of Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Party’s nominee for mayor of New York City.

In mere months after his return to the White House, a country that appeared to still be subject to some notion of the rule of law even during Trump’s first term has fully transformed into one subject to the whims of Donald Trump—aided and abetted by servile congressional majorities and a Supreme Court where six Roger Taneys sit instead of just one. People documented and undocumented alike are kidnapped off the street by masked ICE agents without badges, IDs, warrants, or anything resembling accountability. Active duty soldiers are mobilized for domestic law enforcement duties in defiance of federal law. From 2016 to the present, this country has recreated many of the worst failures of its history—resegregation of the federal government, mass deportation, xenophobic immigration policy, unprovoked military action against foreign nations, and more. This 4th of July and those to come will not be a day to celebrate the country, but to lament how far it has fallen.