Can fireworks illuminate a sky when the light of liberty has been extinguished?

By James J. Devine

As America approaches her Semiquincentennial on July 4, 2026, our nation is marking these 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence by shredding the Constitution of the United States, with President Donald Trump deploying armed military troops to cities, Congress ignoring attacks on its purse-string purview, and courts demonstrating they are powerless after voters elected a fascist dictator.

This is not a pageant of patriotism but a funeral for the republic, and the pallbearers are the very institutions designed to save it.

The spectacle is a masterclass in cynical irony: we will wave flags woven from the very threads of the civic fabric we are systematically unraveling.

The military, sworn to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, now parades through the streets of Los Angeles and the District of Columbia as an occupying force against our citizens, their oath crumpled and discarded like a protestor’s sign.

Congress, the people’s branch, watches a president seize its power of the purse with a shrug of profound cowardice, proving that self-preservation trumps sworn duty every time.

And the courts, those hallowed halls of justice, issue rulings that are immediately, publicly, and contemptuously ignored, their authority revealed as nothing more than a collective fiction. At least until controversies over the president’s law-breaking reach the Supreme Court, where a stubborn conservative majority consents to these crimes.

The founding generation pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to birth a system of limited power and boundless liberty.

We, their heirs, have traded that sacred inheritance for the cheap thrills of a strongman and the false security of the boot on our neighbor’s neck. We are not celebrating 250 years of history; we are presiding over its autopsy.

The cause of death will be listed as a self-inflicted wound, a suicide by a thousand cuts of apathy, ignorance, and a venomous desire for order at the expense of freedom.

Let the festivities begin. Let the tanks roll down the boulevards named after Jefferson and Madison.

These strapped soldiers can help kidnap innocent workers born in the wrong place and re-establish the institution of slavery, albeit renamed to protect the silent voices of everyday Americans.

This grotesque pantomime of “law and order” finds its most harrowing expression in the perversion of the very soldiers sworn to protect it, once a symbol of defense against tyranny, now weaponized as its primary instrument. Their mission is no longer to confront a foreign enemy on a distant shore, but to conduct a chilling, domestic harvest—rounding up innocent workers whose only crime was being born on the wrong side of an arbitrary line.

This is not mere deportation; it is the wholesale resurrection of slavery, cynically renamed for a modern audience.

Call it “mandatory workforce participation,” “administrative detention,” or “community service restitution.” The euphemisms are a thin, cheap paint slapped over the rotten wood of forced labor.

The people ripped from their homes and families by armed troops are not processed through courts but through quotas. Their freedom is not adjudicated; it is allocated. They may be dispatched to work in slaughterhouses, construction sites, and agricultural fields owned by the regime’s loyalists, their labor stolen to fuel an economy now entirely subservient to political power.

It answers the base demand for “cheap labor” while simultaneously appeasing the nativist scream to “make them go away.” The contradiction is resolved in the most horrifying way possible: they don’t go away; they simply disappear into the machinery of the state, their humanity erased, their existence reduced to a unit of production.

The genius of this rebranding is its insidious appeal to the malignant logic of this new order’s supporters. It provides a two-fold satisfaction: the visceral thrill of punishing a despised outsider, and the cold, economic benefit of their uncompensated toil.

The birthday party where the guest of honor is already dead is a powerful reminder that we’re undermining our rights and freedoms to build a system that would make the Founding Fathers, slaveholders though some were, recoil in horror.

The Founding Fathers understood a republic could not long endure half-free and half-enslaved. The new model, however, seeks to perfect that original sin, creating a nation where freedom is a privilege for the loyal and bondage is the destiny for the inconvenient.

The grandest joke of this Semiquincentennial is that the man orchestrating the dismantling of the American experiment will stand before a monument to its founders and declare it a celebration, while the rest of the world looks on in horror.