It is Independence Day in these United States. This holiday is bitterly ironic given the current state of brazen fascism in America as the Trance Regime continues to dismantle institutional norms. Meanwhile, politicians wring their hands as they capitulate to the felonious Predator in Chief and his minions. Senator Lisa Murkowski has ensured that her place in history will be infamous due to her game of political hot potato with the Big Bogus Boondoggle. Because she took the coward’s way out, along with other Republicans who claimed to dislike what was in the bill, that disastrous piece of legislation has passed. The ostensibly Christian politicians who pushed for its passage then danced to the Village People song “YMCA” in gleeful delight at taking food from hungry people and health care from those who need it — among much else that is horrifying in the bill. it was an incredibly bleak day for America.

Much of the bill reflects what is in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Trump lied and tried to distance himself from that Christofascist playbook, but Heritage President Kevin Roberts himself admitted that Trump was in fact lying because of political expediency. Trump, Roberts, Russell Vought, and the other contributors knew that their blueprint for a Christofascist government with libertarian tax policies would be incredibly unpopular, which is why they all tried to pretend it was never their goal. As Tim Walz said during the campaign though, no one writes a playbook that they don’t intend to use.

Roberts wrote the foreword to the document and consistently used the term “ordered liberty” throughout. For Roberts, and other Christofascists, people are only allowed to be as free as they want others to be. Members of the LGBTQIA community don’t deserve freedom according to Heritage’s manifesto. The same goes for immigrants, women, people who follow religions other than Christianity, and progressive Christians whose theological views do not conform to the authoritarian anti-Jesus goals of Christian nationalists. The racism in their regressive vision for America is also plain to see. They want whitewashed history taught and white privilege to be the norm in society, because they’re racists.

None of this looks like freedom. None of this looks anything at all like Jesus’ ethical teachings for how people should live if they choose to follow him. None of it looks anything remotely like the rhetoric we hear about America’s loftiest ideals, that of an America that claims to be a shining beacon on a hill for all humanity to aspire to. It looks like the same well-worn wealthy elitism, white supremacy, heteronormative patriarchy, and xenophobic nativism that has so long been a blight on American history. It’s going to kill people due to its wanton cruelty and heinous disregard for life — which is ironic given their faux pro-life rhetoric.

I have not celebrated the Fourth of July holiday in well over a decade. Usually, I just call it Nationalistic Nonsense Day, because it is, and has always been nonsensical to claim that all “men” are created equal while simultaneously enslaving people as so many of the founders did when Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. I won’t celebrate the holiday again until the U.S. has an Intersectional Truth and Reconciliation Commission that addresses the codification of systemic racism and white supremacy into our laws, the genocide and displacement of Native Americans, imperialism, anti-immigrant nativism and xenophobia, androcratic sexism and misogyny, Christian supremacy, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and anti-LGBTQIA bigotry. The only way out of this mess is to truly go through it, and as a nation, we have hardly begun the process. When we do, perhaps then freedom will actually ring, and I will be proud to be an American.

As of now though, rights and freedoms continue to be denied to people as white supremacist Christians have seemingly entrenched themselves in the halls of power. The hard fought victories that marginalized groups have won over time, are being stripped away again from women, workers, people of color, immigrants, the disabled, and non-Christians. The Trance Regime is just getting started with its plans to consolidate power and destroy democracy. They are smugly basking in the illusion of their power, yet I firmly believe that they have overplayed their hand. I’ll only be proven correct in that belief if we the people rise up nonviolently to stand strong against them. Every tyrannical regime in history has fallen. It’s up to us to make sure that streak continues as expeditiously as possible.

I’ll close with a quote from theologian Dorothee Soelle that I believe puts paid to the Christofascists’ anti-Christian playbook.

“The God of the prophets did not preach the nation-state, but community between strangers and natives. The apostle Paul did not base the justification of sinners on the Protestant work ethic, but on grace, which appears for young and old, for diligent and for lazy people! And Jesus did not make the family the central value of human life, but the solidarity of those deprived their rights.” – in The Window of Vulnerability, p. 140