The Challenge in Facing 4 July in the United States

By Bill Fletcher Jr

July 6, 2026

Source: AlterInter

Illustration from R. G. Horton’s pro-Confederate propaganda "history" of the American Civil War

There has been something almost surreal in President Donald Trump’s efforts to both whitewash US history as well as make 4 July a celebration of his own delusional greatness. There is little that can be done about the latter, but for all progressive forces, there is certainly something that must be done regarding the efforts towards the former.

For the purposes of this essay, we shall leave aside Trump’s 3 July speech about the alleged threat of “communism.” Instead, we shall focus on the problem of history.

The challenge in the United States is that we are taught to be suspicious of history, if not hate it. Instead, we are encouraged to embrace myth. Though this may sound strange, if not implausible, it makes perfect sense when one understands the USA as having resulted from a settler-colony. Think about it for a moment. A factually accurate history of the origins of the United States would read something like this:

In 1607, a group of English colonists invaded a territory in what is now known as ‘Virginia,’ a territory occupied for thousands of years by an indigenous population, and began a process of seizing land and people, spreading disease and introducing slavery.

There is nothing in that statement that can be challenged. The problem, of course, is that such a telling is not a wonderful way to start a narrative about the greatness of one’s country. More importantly, the actual history of a settler-colony is one that always questions the moral legitimacy of the state established as a result of the colonization process. This challenge or question acts as a perpetual nightmare for the resulting state and those who support it, whether such support is passive or active.

Thus, “July 4th” is complicated by both the contradictory nature of the 1775-1783 war of independence, as well as due to being a part and parcel of a longer and equally contradictory history of what came to be the United States. It is this that Trump and his MAGA minions wish to suppress and, both literally and figuratively, whitewash.

The reality of US history is the actuality of contradiction. There are really two histories of the United States, each having its own respective subsets. And it is these two histories that are irreconcilable, even when they may agree on certain specific facts. There is the history of the United States from the standpoint of those who have sought to construct a capitalist state, in effect a white supremacist, male supremacist imperial state. Separately, there is the history of the USA from the standpoint of the subaltern classes and groups, a history of class struggle; a history of the struggles against white supremacist national oppression; a history of the struggles against patriarchy/male supremacy; a history of the struggles against the capitalist degradation of the environment; a history of solidarity with oppressed populations in other parts of the planet.

These irreconcilable histories—that of the ruling groups vs those of the subaltern classes—are what we find at stake when we are asked to celebrate 4 July. Do we uphold the rhetoric of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence regarding life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or do we dig deeper and unpack their attack on Native Americans and their fury with King George III for the Proclamation of 1763, halting colonial expansion beyond the Appalachian Mountain range? Do we turn a blind eye to the signatories’ repudiation of the British King for attempting to turn the settlers into “slaves,” when the settlers overwhelmingly embraced slavery? Can we, in other words, remove myth, and grasp the facts and currents of history in order to understand the circumstances and actions that have led us to where we find ourselves today, both domestically and internationally? Can we utilize history, to be blunt, in order to grasp the roots of rightwing populism and neofascism in the USA and, perhaps, get a sense how to utilize the history produced by the subaltern classes against the tyrants?

Those are the questions with which I leave the reader on this, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a longtime socialist, trade unionist and international solidarity activist in the USA. He is a cofounder of standing4democracy.org and can be followed @BillFletcherJr; billfletcherjr.com.

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Bill Fletcher Jr

Bill Fletcher Jr (born 1954) has been an activist since his teen years. Upon graduating from college he went to work as a welder in a shipyard, thereby entering the labor movement. Over the years he has been active in workplace and community struggles as well as electoral campaigns. He has worked for several labor unions in addition to serving as a senior staffperson in the national AFL-CIO. Fletcher is the former president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies; and in the leadership of several other projects. Fletcher is the co-author (with Peter Agard) of “The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941”; the co-author (with Dr. Fernando Gapasin) of “Solidarity Divided: The crisis in organized labor and a new path toward social justice“; and the author of “‘They’re Bankrupting Us’ – And Twenty other myths about unions.” Fletcher is a syndicated columnist and a regular media commentator on television, radio and the Web.

No Holiday for the Indentured

By Philip A Farruggio

July 5, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Alexandra Curtis/Wikimediacommons, in public domain

Well, the propaganda they sell us like soda water is that ‘ We are a free country and everyone has the opportunities to succeed in life.’ Ok, and since we are immersed as a nation in the quicksand of non unionism ( less than 7 % of private sector workers are in unions) many working stiffs have become 21st Century Indentured Servants. In feudal times the indentured servant had to work for the boss just to stay above water financially. You lose a week or two of work due to illness and you’re up the creek. Gone!

Let’s take one example this writer found by chance today. This is what it means to be an indentured servant on the  250th anniversary of America: The retail clerk with a broken wrist. I will call her ‘ Ms T ‘ working for her 15th year at the place earning $10.50 per hour with no benefits etc. She said she fell at home, the one she rents for her family at $1800 a month in town. Had to rush to the ER, has NO insurance ( she said even ObamaCare wanted $ 300 a month with a one year wait for real coverage. Between the ER and then being admitted as a patient they charged her $20k, with her wrist surgery costing $50k ( believe it or not). Obviously she asked for some charity from the hospital and surgeon’s billing, and they will be getting back to her with an answer. The woman is 59 and to put it bluntly ‘ Up the creek!’ Is this what our founding fathers anticipated or is this simply the way it always was and is?

Imagine if that store clerk belonged to a union and had the same Medicare that I have. She would still owe money, and without a supplemental plan, at least 20% of said bills would be her concern. Is this what we should be celebrating on July 4th? You can take all the fireworks and hot dogs and burgers and stuff em until those in power act like working stiffs and not the indentured servants of the super rich! As my late great union organizing  pal Walt DeYoung put it : ‘Nuff Said’.Email

Philip A Farruggio

Philip A Farruggio is a free lance columnist, host of a radio interview show and lifelong Anti War Activist. He is son and grandson of Brooklyn, NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, Class of '74. He has a blog on the itstheempirestupid.com website produced by Chuck Gregory. You can find Philip's work on many sites such as Countercurrents, Dissident Voice, Nation of Change and Muck Rack.

The Plot to Ruin America

Nick Estes

 July 7, 2026

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Image by Koshu Kunii.

Nothing encapsulates the decline of the American project quite like the optics of its 250th anniversary. While four hundred masked neo-fascists marched through the capitol in navy-blue button-downs and khakis chanting “Reclaim America!”—entirely unchallenged either by police or antifascists—the official Independence Day parade was canceled because of extreme heat. It’s a disturbing vignette for our era. The country is turning far to the right and becoming too hot to even celebrate its own founding myths, reaching temperatures that climate scientists said would have been “virtually impossible” before human-caused climate change.

So who’s to blame for this current mess? Predictably, the political class has no interest in examining the structural decay. In two back-to-back speeches this weekend, President Trump workshopped a new scapegoat: communism. The tone summoned the anger of his 2017 inauguration speech, “American Carnage,” when he blamed open borders and foreign nations for gutting the American Dream, carefully avoiding the corporations that plundered the working class and spoiled the land. But his second term is less focused on hardening borders and more focused on what he calls the “enemy within,” which has included immigrants and anyone potentially critical of U.S. foreign policy, especially the fanatical, bipartisan worship of genocidal Zionism. Trump has met that “enemy” with violent and deadly force, using the Department of Homeland Security as the main instrument of terror in places like Minnesota. That definition of the enemy has expanded to include antifascism, which he has designated a “domestic terrorist organization,” paving the way for the targeting of any organization or individual supporting actions considered “antifascism,” such as immigrant defense or even the broad set of movements and beliefs under the rubric of “anti-capitalism.” In other words, we’re reaching a moment when it’s illegal to be antifascist.

This rhetorical escalation is no accident; it is a calculated electoral strategy. More and more, as an electoral left movement makes key wins in the lead-up to the November mid-terms, Trump will most likely ratchet up his anti-communist rhetoric, painting even the most rabid, establishment anticommunist Democrats as party to a nefarious communist plot. That has already included targeting more organized formations of the socialist and anti-imperialist left.

Viewed in this light, Trump’s speech last Friday at the so-called Shrine of Democracy was probably his most ironic. Under the shadow of Mount Rushmore, Trump went on a dark tirade naming the enemy as the “communist menace,” a movement made up of “illegal immigrants,” “criminals,” “radicals,” “thieves,” and “lunatics” who “come in and loot [and] pillage our nation.” This isn’t just typical rhetorical theater from one of the world’s greatest confidence men. It is the foundational myth-making required to justify a very real domestic police state.

There is no small irony in those accusations. The very ground beneath the president’s feet is stolen land, and the monument itself is a permanent testament to the exact kind of looting and pillaging he attributes to Marxist agitators.

If you possess even a baseline level of cognitive function and haven’t succumbed to total historical brain rot, Trump’s ultimatum should make you laugh and perhaps cry. He stood beneath the shadow of thieves and men who had looted and pillaged Indigenous land. The shrine had been built at the final destination for what was once known by the Lakotas as the “Thieves Road,” the trail Custer had illegally carved into the Black Hills in 1874 in search of gold. But don’t take my word for it. The Supreme Court declared the ground beneath Trump’s very feet stolen land—that is, pillaged and looted. In fact, it called the settlers and miners who had entered the lands known as He Sapa trespassers, ruling in 1980 that the starvation-driven coercion used to strip the Sioux of the Black Hills was a profound constitutional violation.

The irony is that the only thief present at Mount Rushmore that day was the very country holding the party. Trump’s warnings about a ‘communist menace’ threatening American heritage are just a projection trick—it’s an inversion of reality, where the oppressors have become the oppressed, and the invaders act in self-defense against the very people they have robbed and slaughtered. This projection and inversion is central to the very American identity Trump claims is under attack.

“You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America,” he said. “You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.” The ultimatums are spurious but appear to create a loyalty test, forcing a choice between standing with genocidaires and slavers, and their apologists, or with those who tried to overthrow those violent systems of oppression. (I think I know what side we’d all like to be on.)

Those supposedly loyal to the nineteenth-century German political economist spread “lies about our heritage” and “tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors.” But one has to wonder about the legacy of Marx as a European when he said of the historical reality of class revolution, “as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendency for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes.” Or when he described just how the ascendancy of that bourgeoisie was achieved in the first volume of Das Kapital, where he dryly noted that the dawn of capitalist production was “[t]he discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population” of the Americas.

Understanding that modern capitalism required genocide and plunder is, apparently, quite scary. Trump has met rhetoric with action, and we should take note.

In his second term, Trump has waged an all-out assault on his political opponents, primarily those on the left. Specifically, that includes what he laid out in his National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” and signed on September 25, 2025. The directive fully recalibrates post-9/11 counterterrorism objectives to target domestic political speech, organizing, and funding. I wouldn’t say it is the darkest chapter in U.S. history, but we should take serious stock of how easily the post-9/11 security apparatus—originally built to hunt down and kill “terrorists”—has been seamlessly turned inward to criminalize domestic dissent, freeze the bank accounts of progressive non-profits, and treat local antifascist activists like insurgent cells. It has effectively implemented widespread counterinsurgency in the absence of an actual insurgency.

After all, fascism isn’t new to the United States, and it hasn’t historically had to don the mantle of fascism to operate. Whether it was the genocidal blood quantum laws of federal Indian policy or Jim Crow racial segregation, European fascists took much of their inspiration from the colonial and white supremacist legal regimes of their American counterparts when they drafted documents such as the Nuremberg Laws.

And climate crisis aside, it is worth making a controversial point: our present state of affairs is far from the most repressive or authoritarian era the United States has ever seen. I’m not saying it can’t get worse—it could. But it also could turn out another way, if people are willing to fight for an alternative. That’s not to minimize the real and terrible danger of the current moment and the necessity to confront it and build alternatives. Rather, it serves as a baseline for reality. As a student of history and a historical subject myself, it is humbling to read the stories of our ancestors—how they survived genocide through everything from everyday acts of defiance to organized resistance movements that undoubtedly staved off complete annihilation.

This piece first appeared on Red Scare.

Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is a journalist, historian and co-host of the Red Nation Podcast. He is the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019).