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Back in March, I wrote about the late Sarah Keys Evans, a Black veteran who played a key role in desegregating interstate travel. Before the summer of 1952, the 23-year-old private first class had never even taken part in a civil rights protest—but after she was arrested and jailed overnight in her Women’s Army Corps uniform for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white Marine, Keys Evans spent years fighting for justice through the courts, paving the way for Rosa Parks and the Freedom Riders.

I discussed Keys Evans’ underappreciated but important case with the author Amy Nathan, whose latest book, Riding Into History, tells her story. Her profile had risen in recent years, as I wrote at the time:

In 2020, nearly 70 years after Evans’ arrest, Roanoke Rapids installed a series of murals about the veteran’s fight for justice, which Evans told a Time reporter she saw as a tribute to all the overlooked women who “kept the spark going” during the Civil Rights Movement.

But weeks after that first piece ran, I received a tip that the Army had removed an article about Keys Evans from its official website. Based on screenshots captured by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the article by T. Anthony Bell, first published in February 2014, was taken down last July, at the height of the second Trump administration’s campaign to scrub Black history from public monuments, institutions, and records. It remains unavailable.

Keys Evans’ story is one of thousands about women and people of color to be removed since Trump’s return to office.

That effort has hit military history particularly hard. Keys Evans’ story is just one of thousands about women and people of color in the armed services to be removed since Trump returned to office in January 2025. That February, at the behest of the president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the assistant to the secretary of defense for public affairs issued a memorandum ordering senior Pentagon leadership to wipe military websites of any content promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” 

“In accordance with recent policy changes and renewed digital content guidance, the Army temporarily unpublished content featured on cultural observance months webpages,” Christopher Surridge, an Army spokesperson, told Mother Jones in an emailed statement.

“We are tirelessly working through content featured on these webpages, and historical articles will soon be republished to better align with current guidance,” Surridge added. “As this is an ongoing process requiring a manual content review, article restoration might take some time.”

Following public outcry, some webpages were quickly restored, like an article about baseball player Jackie Robinson’s service in World War II and another about the highly decorated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed mostly of Japanese Americans. But many more articles about the contributions of marginalized communities to US military achievements are still hidden. 

Hegseth’s attacks on DEI go beyond censoring history. In the past year and half, the defense secretary has ordered the military to end its observance of heritage months, proposed strict grooming standards that would disproportionately impact Black and brown soldiers, and personally blocked women and Black service members from promotions.

On the eve of the nation’s 250th anniversary, which the administration has commemorated through sanitized displays seemingly designed to paper over the country’s complex past, the lessons of Keys Evans’ fight for justice and equality feel especially pertinent. Her story serves as a reminder that, in the words of T. Anthony Bell, the author of the Army’s now-spiked article:

The modern civil rights movement was much broader than the contributions made by the likes of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the NAACP or Rosa Parks in changing America’s unjust racial climate.

It was more about the thousands of unheralded, everyday citizens whose brave actions and collective voices blended together to create rumbles that shook the country’s consciousness, giving rise to individuals and organizations that would lead the struggle.

Pfc. Sarah Louise Keys was one such citizen.

Four games into the 2026 World Cup, the French national team, which presently looks like it will cruise to a third straight final after winning all its matches by two or three goals, has started just three different white players. It only brought five of them to this World Cup. Its best players are named Mbappé, Dembélé, and Olise. They have Cameroonian-Algerian, Malian-Mauritanian-Senegalese, and British-Nigerian-Franco-Algerian ancestry, respectively. They are French.

Time has vindicated the French approach to sourcing talent for its national team. Everyone else at this World Cup is doing what the French national team started doing 30 years ago: weaponizing its multiculturalism. Or, conversely, cultivating and capitalizing on its diaspora.

Nearly a quarter of the 1,248 players in the 2026 World Cup were born in a different country from the one they represent. To wit: There are 99 French-born players at this World Cup—more than were born in any other nation—but only 26 of them are on the France roster. The rest play for other countries, which pick off the players eligible for their teams who didn’t make the grade for Les Bleus. Such is the glut of world-class players produced in France, emanating overwhelmingly from the super-diverse suburbs surrounding Paris, that the other nations contesting this tournament have eagerly gathered up the leftovers. Enough of them to fill almost three full World Cup rosters.      

And yet of the 48 teams contesting this quadrennial tournament, France seems to be having the most vociferous national discourse on how “French” the French team should be. Which is to say, how white. France alone bickers over what the racial makeup of its national team says about the nation, which, per the Institut National d’Études Démographiques, now comprises as much as 18 percent Arab or Afro-French citizens. 

Seemingly every two years, when a World Cup or European Championship comes along, another tired debate sparks off in France, which may well have the most politicized national team in soccer, clearing an extraordinarily high bar. All the more so since the French have been one of the planet’s most successful teams in the last three decades, winning the World Cup twice and the European Championship once, while making the title game of those tournaments thrice more. 

The men’s national team is the public-facing French institution that has consistently functioned the best—although you’d never know it from the way it’s spoken about.

In 1996, Jean-Marie Le Pen, then France’s far-right leader, dismissed Les Bleus as “artificial” for having to “bring in players from abroad and call them the French national team.” They very much hadn’t—all but one player was born in France.

Two years later, that team, popularly described as “black, blanc, beur” (Black, white, Arab), even though only star playmaker Zinedine Zidane actually fit the latter ethnicity—won the World Cup on home soil and was heralded as a paradigm for a new, more diverse and multicultural France. This, of course, ignored the rampant racism and substantial issues still faced by the nation’s minorities at the time, and which persist—from 2020 to 2024, the number of reported hate crimes in France more than doubled. 

Zidane and his Black teammate Lilian Thuram understood that nothing had been solved, even though many of their countrymen felt good about themselves. They remained vocal about the dangers posed by Le Pen and his movement. The National Front, Zidane said in 2002, “does not correspond to French values.” Zidane reiterated his stance on the National Front in 2017: “We have to avoid it as much as we can.”

Kylian Mbappé, the face and captain of the team today—and currently the World Cup’s co-leading scorer, along with Lionel Messi, at six goals apiece—was born in that very year, 1998. Lilian Thuram’s son, Marcus, is his teammate. Ahead of another election that threatened to elevate the rebranded National Rally in 2024, now led by Le Pen’s daughter Marine, Marcus Thuram warned the nation: “The situation is extremely serious,” he said. “As citizens, we have to fight to make sure that the National Rally doesn’t get through.”  

Mbappé agreed and said so publicly, calling the National Rally’s ascent “catastrophic.” Whereas his fellow global megastars Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have been studiously apolitical all their careers—never mind that the latter was named for Ronald Reagan and both have taken many millions from sports-washing Gulf states—Mbappé has shown no compunction about wielding his enormous platform in opposition to the far right. Nor have the rest of the team, flouting convention in international soccer.

Unpopular centrist French president and noted soccer nut Emmanuel Macron has been in power throughout the nation’s glorious soccer run and has attached himself to the team like a barnacle. He personally and successfully lobbied Mbappé against leaving Paris Saint-Germain for Real Madrid, citing the national interest, for several years, although Mbappé eventually went in 2024. It has brought Macron little benefit; not even his association with World Cup success could make the people love him. 

With yet another round of French elections in the offing next spring, Mbappé doubled down in an interview with Vanity Fair ahead of the World Cup. “I know what it means, and what kind of consequences it can have for my country when those kinds of people take control,” he said of the National Rally. “So we are citizens. We have the right to give our opinion like anyone else.”

That word, citoyen (citizen), is meaningful in France. During the French Revolution, it was used as a greeting, not unlike comrade under Communism. “Aux armes, les citoyens,” the national anthem still impels. Arm yourselves, citizens. It is drilled into French children that good citizenship is a high virtue. 

France manager Didier Deschamps, who is white and himself a veteran of that 1998 World Cup–winning team, which he captained, lamented that his players would be asked about politics during this  World Cup. But he stopped well short of condemning them. “I’m not going to tell them not to speak,” he said. “They are well aware that there are sensitive topics. They are citizens.”

It’s unclear exactly at what point during the French Revolution the rallying cry of “liberté, egalité, fraternité” (liberty, equality, brotherhood) was adopted, eventually becoming the new republic’s national slogan. What is entirely clear is when it was bastardized into “liberté, egalité, Mbappé.” That was the 2018 World Cup, when the 19-year-old led his nation to its second world championship. 

It proved to be prophetic. As national team captain, he is so conscious of his clout that he works little digs at the far right into humdrum press conferences. A journalist trying to help Mbappé spot him in a crowded room earlier on in the World Cup waved and said, “I’m to your left, really the far left.”

“Luckily you weren’t on the other side,” Mbappé shot back with a grin, before the room broke into laughter.

He understands that the work of making the case for diversity is unfinished, both in soccer and beyond it. As recently as 2011, a scandal spilled into the open when it transpired that, in a meeting with the acquiescing national team head coach present (Deschamps’s predecessor and ’98 teammate, Laurent—wait for it—Blanc), federation officials discussed capping the number of nonwhite players in the nation’s youth academies at 30 percent. Delightfully, a 12-year-old Mbappé happened to be interviewed in the aftermath of the scandal, speaking into the camera and declaring, “If you look at history, the best ones [soccer players] were Black ones and Arab ones.”

Around that same time, the underperformance of a querulous and scandal-plagued incarnation of the national team—which went on strike at the 2010 World Cup over a falling-out with its head coach—was blamed on the team’s Black and Muslim players and those of North African descent. 

There is a creeping sense that France will win this World Cup if it decides it wants to win it. It abounds with talent. Deschamps left players at home who would have starred for just about any other team. I was at their tournament opener against Senegal, and Les Bleus were a hot mess in the first half until they decided that, actually, they could be bothered after all and cut the African champions apart in the second half. I was at their round-of-32 match with Sweden on Tuesday, a 3–0 rout that could have gotten far uglier. I watched Mbappé score four times in those two games. 

I also saw a Frenchman in a full Napoleon costume. But what struck me was the makeup of France’s fans who followed their team to New Jersey. They were almost exclusively white. Deschamps is white. His assistants are all white. And yet so few of the players are. Zidane, French-born to Algerian parents, the impeccably qualified alternative, has been lying in wait to replace Deschamps for years—he finally will after this tournament. That will make him the national team’s first nonwhite manager.

This will be noted on the far right. Nothing about the Les Bleus is apolitical. 

“You can be a player, you can be an international star, but above all that, you are a citizen,” Mbappé told Vanity Fair. 

The French team is full of citizens.

As part of its attempt to pervert America’s semiquincentennial into a partisan celebration of the most corrupt president in American history, the White House has put out, in partnership with Hillsdale College, a series of propaganda videos masquerading as history. A 13-minute piece titled “The Story of America: The Faith of Our Founders” is a paragon of the genre. The video features narration from Mark David Hall, a professor at Regent University and a member of Trump’s so-called Religious Liberty Commission. I watched it so that you don’t have to.  

Hall opens by dismissing the “popular writers who claim that America’s Founders owed something to the Enlightenment.” Historians going all the way back to the founding itself have maintained that the Founders drew heavily from the Enlightenment—but Hall, like so many in the MAGA movement, isn’t interested in serious historians and cites none during this video. His agenda is information-averse: Sure, he includes some snippets of texts and historical facts. But he’d prefer to convince viewers that the Founders were super-holy men, not learned ones. And these Founders definitely never intended to separate church and state in the first place. Apparently, the Founders inserted that pesky First Amendment prohibition on the establishment of religion in the Constitution just to ensure that conservative Christians would assume their natural right to rule the country.

Hall starts with the claim that America’s Founders cited the Bible more than any other text. By this logic, Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason—which cites scripture repeatedly in order to make the point that, as he wrote, “it is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder”—must count as an exercise in religious devotion and Christian nationalism.

Hall then dwells on comparatively minor figures such as Elias Boudinot, the director of the U.S. Mint, who resigned from that post in 1805 to found the American Bible Society, which he led for five years. Hall neglects to mention that Boudinot’s boss, President Thomas Jefferson, was in those very same years taking a razor to the Bible to separate the morsels of moral wisdom from any reference to the supernatural, miracles, and other references to the divinity of Jesus. It was like locating “diamonds in a dunghill,” Jefferson wrote in an 1813 letter to John Adams.

Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, George Washington, Ethan Allen, and other Founders were also known in their time as “infidels,” “deists,” and otherwise unorthodox in their religious views. Yet, as Hall tells us dismissively, in this video about the faith of our Founders, “that label [deism] may only be applied to only a handful of individuals.”

The narrative reaches a climactic absurdity in the treatment of the debates concerning religious freedom in Virginia. As Hall notes, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, authored principally by George Mason, declares “that religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.” According to Hall, this somehow proves that Mason never wanted to separate church and state. In fact, the point of the Declaration was to do precisely that. Mason himself was a classic Enlightenment rationalist who valued empirical inquiry and universal natural rights over blind obedience to religious dogma and clerical leaders. That’s why he put in the bit about religion being grounded on “reason and conviction”—and not revelation. Hall manages to twist this declaration of religious freedom and the values of reason and equality into pro-religious nationalist messaging.

Sure enough, by the time we arrive at the photomontage with which the video culminates, we are treated to an engraving, based on the 1866 painting by Henry Brueckner, of George Washington that shows him kneeling in the snow at Valley Forge. The alleged Valley Forge epiphany has been repeatedly debunked ever since it was invented, including by the Valley Forge Park Commission, which concluded in 1918, after a comprehensive investigation that included analysis of thousands of pages of correspondence and diaries of Washington and his staff, along with those of other officials and personnel who were at the military camp, that “in none of these were found a single paragraph that will substantiate the tradition of the ‘Prayer at Valley Forge.’” In fact, Washington was infamous among the ministers of his time for pointedly refusing to kneel in church. But as with the Christian nationalist movement’s elevation of the work of revisionist historian David Barton, the myths, contradictions, and deliberate decontextualizations are too valuable to reject simply because they are not true.

This is hardly surprising, given that Mark David Hall serves on the advisory board of lay leaders on Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, which was established in May 2025 by executive order. The interests of the commission, which is largely comprised of conservative Christians, appears to conform to the agenda of the Christian nationalist movement, whose leaders have played a pivotal role in putting Trump in office. Its chair has called for a federal hotline with an automated recording: “There is no separation of church and state.” Another member pressed for giving a presidential medal to the baker who declined to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. Many members of the commission, along with those on its advisory boards, are frequently featured at right-wing and Christian nationalist conferences and gatherings, such as Road to Majority, Pray Vote Stand, CPAC, NatCon, and the National Pro-Life Summit.

In its public-facing media, the commission does address several incidents of genuine religious persecution. But other action items include expanding opportunities for faith-based organizations to receive public money and for conservative religious people to practice discrimination themselves if they have a faith-based excuse.

Like the rest of the MAGA movement, Hall pretends to be standing on the side of the people against the tyranny of those liberal educational institutions that dare to report the truth about America’s Enlightenment Founders. But Hall is a professor at Regent University, itself an educational institution aligned with a partisan movement that is bankrolled by a sector of the ultrawealthy.

Maybe the defining feature of the video—as well as the commission, and the MAGA movement in general—is its divisiveness. America’s 250th anniversary might have been an opportunity to celebrate the unity that, in spite of our many setbacks and challenges, Americans have managed to achieve over the centuries in the face of so much natural diversity. The animating spirit of “e pluribus unum” might have been nice to hear at a time like this. Even at the time of America’s founding, as serious historians have long noted, America was exceptionally diverse in its forms of religious expression. What the White House has offered now, in propaganda videos just as in its daily cycle of corruption and self-dealing, is the opportunity for an aggrieved minority to hate those people it imagines to have strayed from a supposedly pure, original version of an America that has never in fact existed.

American exceptionalism is an overblown and provincial tradition, but it’s our 250th birthday, so let’s indulge. As The New Republic’s USA 250 series showed—on newsstands now!—the country has gotten a lot wrong, but it’s also gotten a lot right. Here are some of the biggest achievements we can boast about, but which, in the Trump era, are eroding or precarious.

Welcoming immigrants: In his last speech as president, more than two years after signing the biggest amnesty for undocumented immigrants in world history, Ronald Reagan expressed the political consensus on the subject by quoting from a letter he’d received, “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, Turk or Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

Donald Trump was the first modern president to express an attitude toward immigration that was more hostile than that of the average member of his own party. Now, although the Supreme Court did at least uphold birthright citizenship this week, we have seen recent immigrants subjected to a reign of terror with violent deportations, cruel detentions, and immigration agents functioning as a fascist force.

Higher education: The U.S. has long been home to one of the best higher education systems in the world, with the greatest variety of majors, prestigious institutions that draw top talent from around the world, as well as accessible working-class schools like community colleges and regional universities. Our college sports are also unrivaled worldwide.

But it’s all falling apart. Tuition is unaffordable to many American families, and the number of college-age Americans is declining. While American higher education has long been a boon to overseas students—and vice versa, since they tend to pay full tuition—an increasingly hostile immigration regime has curbed the number of students coming here to study. Cuts in federal funding for research and student aid are also hitting schools hard and impoverishing the college experience.

Science: The U.S. has had some of the best infrastructure to support science in the world. In addition to our now-besieged universities, we have been the envy of the world with government agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has virtually eliminated malaria and polio from the United States and is responsible for the eradication of smallpox, the only human disease totally eliminated from the world.

But with decreases in funding and attacks on foreign nationals coming to the U.S. to do research, labs are closing all over the country, scientists are relocating, and many science students are choosing other fields.

Consumer goods: Early in the Cold War, as the Americans and Soviets competed to prove whose system was superior, the latter pointed out that under communism, no one was homeless, no matter how poor. Capitalism, America’s boosters countered, could deliver better stuff: TVs, toasters, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers. Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had a famous “Kitchen Debate” during the 1959 World’s Fair, where the U.S. put shiny appliances and gadgets on display. Khrushchev played it cool, saying, “We have all these things.” While it was true that the Soviets were trying to deliver higher-quality goods, the success of that project was limited; envy of America’s designer jeans and shopping malls persisted throughout USSR communism. With the rise of globalism, consumer goods have gotten even more affordable to Americans.

The drive for cheapness has had myriad knock-on effects in the U.S. economy, especially for working-class people, and the goods we consume now aren’t as well made or durable. With Trump’s tariffs—and increased energy costs due to the Iran war—the prices are rising, too.

Innovation: Capitalist propagandists love to boast that the United States is the world capital of innovation—and they’re right. We are responsible for most major inventions, including the steamboat, cash register, air conditioner, personal computer, cell phone, the internet, and much more.

There are many ways to measure innovation, but one crude one is the number of patents. By that tally, the U.S. is still second only to Japan. But there are reasons for concern. The spread of AI may hamper people’s ability to think creatively. Less speculatively, much of the entrepreneurial energy in this country comes from recent immigrants, and Trump has made it much more difficult for people—including high-skilled workers—to come here. An even more direct blow is the Trump administration’s cuts to R&D, which an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office last year found would decrease innovation.

Gay rights: Even decades before Stonewall, the U.S. had the first organized gay rights movement and has been a beacon for LGBTQ people all over the world.

Trump, however, has made bigotry toward trans people central to his administration, and so have many of his fellow conservatives. He has erased many legal protections for LGBTQ Americans and even in some instances mandated discrimination (and in further backward moves, this week the Supreme Court upheld state bans on trans people in girls’ and women’s sports).

Feminism: American women led the world for decades in striving for full civic personhood. After winning the right to vote in 1920, they, decades later, famously disrupted the Miss America pageant, won the right to abortion, and entered the workforce en masse. Trump’s two elections reflected unease with all that, and his administration has rolled back equal rights provisions for women.

National parks: Our national park system—more than 85 million acres of land—has long been the envy of much of the world. Even the Chinese government, no slouch at public infrastructure creation, regards it as a model. We constantly celebrate our great wilderness in America, from legends about the frontier to the “purple mountains’ majesty” of our national anthem to car ads that panoramically revel in the Western landscape. But the park system is what has kept much of that glorious landscape from being turned into auto dealerships, coal mines, or strip malls, as it all would be if our oligarchs had their way. The national parks have never been more popular, in 2024 reaching a record high of 331.9 million visitors. Yet Trump’s cuts to the system have been severe, reducing the NPS workforce by 25 percent, even as he spends lavishly on his immediate environs, like the algae-plagued Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Pop culture: This country was the birthplace of rock and roll, soul, jazz, and rap. And Hollywood in its heyday made the best and most popular mass-market movies in the world. American pop culture has been one of our greatest exports.

There is life in our cultural production machine yet: Last year’s K-pop Demon Hunters, an American production, was a global phenomenon. But with Hollywood’s increasing dependence on IP tentpoles—superhero franchises, sequels, remakes—and the AI slop beginning to infect internet platforms like Spotify, America’s cultural dominance looks shakier every year.

Secular government: Americans have enjoyed freedom of religion, enshrined in the First Amendment, which has also—equally importantly—meant freedom from religion in our everyday interactions with the government.

To the far-right theocrats in Trump’s government, however, “there is no such thing” as separation of church and state in the Constitution. They dismiss the concept as propaganda from “the anti-God left,” and have been working to tear down the wall that our Founders erected between church and state.

Another Supreme Court term has come and gone, and civil society is once again licking its wounds. President Donald Trump has obtained new power, the lives of trans people have gotten worse, and the high court is basically winging it when it comes to its ill-fated new “history and tradition” test on guns. At the same time, things could have gone worse—at least for all of you who work at the Federal Reserve.

The biggest bullet dodged was this week’s decision in Trump v. Barbara, in which the court ruled against Trump’s executive order attempting to nullify the birthright citizenship rights explicitly granted by the Constitution. One of the grand plans of this administration has been to ethnically cleanse the United States, and had the court gone along with Trump and his aide-de-camp, Stephen Miller, millions of Americans might now be facing the end of their citizenship—including the U.S. World Cup team’s current leading scorer, Folarin Balogun. Despite this rare victory of reason over right-wing nuttery, I think we should be concerned that the conservative legal movement still has its eye on waging war on the so-called Reconstruction Amendments—especially the one that grants birthright citizenship in the first place: the Fourteenth Amendment.

I raised an alarm last year about the far right’s desire to delete the Fourteenth. The amendment is a substantial target for the MAGA movement because of the unique way it enables and extols the promise of a multiracial democracy, something that Trump and his minions have sworn to destroy. And the way the Supreme Court overrode the disqualification clause, granting Trump the right to run for office again without any concern for the Constitution’s explicit admonitions against insurrectionists holding high office, gave abundant hope to those who’d like to see the Fourteenth Amendment dismantled.

Do the court’s conservatives disdain the Reconstruction Amendments? “They definitely do, to a certain extent,” says TNR’s Matt Ford. “They’ve largely read the Fifteenth Amendment out of the Constitution, in Brnovich and Callais, by making it impossible to properly enforce the Voting Rights Act, and they more or less nullified the disqualification clause in Trump v. Anderson. There are parts they’re fine with, like the equal protection clause in some circumstances, but they’ll never interpret it as broadly as the liberals.”

Ford says that the most charitable read is along the lines of what Justice Clarence Thomas said in his dissent in Trump v. Barbara. “They generally think the Reconstruction Amendments were designed to address the specific circumstances and exigencies of the post–Civil War era,” he says, “and that while they can have plenty of applications beyond that, they aren’t meant to be used to (in their view) fundamentally restructure American society anymore or provide special treatment for anyone.”

Here’s where the biggest conflict lies, as the liberal position is generally that the Reconstruction Amendments were a second founding, not a postbellum clean-up. “In this view,” says Ford, “Congress has broad powers to ensure that there is no American underclass or subaltern population, which Jim Crow nonetheless managed to create for about 90 years.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson got at this in her concurring opinion, in which she took issue with Thomas’s dissent on these lines. Thomas’s “narrow vision of the Fourteenth Amendment bears little relationship to the history of its ratification,” she wrote, adding that his take on the matter “elides the entire point of the Second Founding: The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery.”

Thomas didn’t win the argument this week. But the fact that these matters are being argued in the first place is cause for serious alarm, according to former Massachusetts Senate candidate Alex Rikleen. “By even considering the legitimacy of birthright citizenship, the Roberts Court, stacked with jurists ready and willing to make anti-constitutional rulings time and again, has helped transform a fringe white supremacist attack on the 14th Amendment into a question that millions of people now understand as up for debate.”

This is hardly a new or novel fear. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Anderson—in which they essentially deleted the disqualification clause from the Constitution—was enabled by the fact that too many were willing to countenance the idea that the plain English language of the Fourteenth Amendment was, in fact, open to interpretation. I am still angry that The New York Times in 2023 referred to the disqualification clause as “an obscure clause of a constitutional amendment enacted after the Civil War,” thus injecting a derogatory bit of editorializing into what purported to be a straight news piece.

In light of the tête-à-tête between Thomas and Jackson, I’m disturbed anew by the way the Times casually denigrated the amendments “enacted after the Civil War,” as if they were some stitched-on appendage and not language that carries the same force and lawfulness as the founding-era amendments. If the paper of record is skeptical that the Reconstruction Amendments are legitimate (and they, like the court’s conservatives, do seem interested in creating a subaltern class beyond the Constitution’s protections, for what it’s worth), this will only further the right-wing project to tear those amendments out of the Constitution and undo the nation’s second founding. So be glad that the worst didn’t happen, but stay on guard—we are not out of danger yet.

When Bryan Stevenson moved to Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1980s, the city—one of America’s most prominent slave trading spaces before the Civil War—had dozens of Confederate monuments and memorials, but nothing commemorating slavery. 

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Today, thanks to Stevenson’s efforts, the city looks much different. Over the last decade, the executive director of the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative has transformed parts of Montgomery through markers acknowledging the legacy of slavery while building the Legacy Sites, a museum and memorials that commemorate the nation’s history of lynching, enslavement, and racial terror across the South. 

“We have to now fight to correct the historic record, to have an honest accounting of what happened to our parents and grandparents and their parents,” Stevenson says. “Because without an honest accounting, we will not make it to the next step.”

This week on Reveal, host Al Letson travels to Montgomery to interview Stevenson as America marks its 250th anniversary. He talks about the importance of memorializing the nation’s darkest chapters as the Trump administration attempts to erase slavery from America’s museums and explains why he sees today’s narrative struggle for racial justice as a generational battle.

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The 250th birthday of the United States is upon us, and the milestone year happens to be falling in the midst of a presidential administration that has made the concept of patriotism … tattered. President Donald Trump and his underlings have carried out, implied, or outright said some things that question just how patriotic their “Make America Great Again” movement really is.

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Consider supporting my work so I can continue creating it: Substack: https://nickanderson.substack.com/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/editorialcartoons Ko-Fi: https://www.patreon.com/c/editorialcartoonsCartoon Related | Trump deflects from Reflecting Pool failure by arresting ‘vandals’…

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President Donald Trump has trundled his way—in pathetic fits and starts—through a caricature of America, one with his own extremely limited personal soundtrack. It’s filled with Lee Greenwood, Italian classics from the weird conservative guy who wrecks opera songs, and Kash Patel’s girlfriend bellowing a pitchy “Star-Spangled Banner.” But what about the real soundtrack of America?

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For our special print issue on the country’s 250th anniversary, we asked about 100 historians and other public intellectuals to make some lists for us that summarize the nation’s high and low points: our best and worst presidents; the images that most sharply define American history; the greatest works of art; and more. The results are fun, fascinating, and give a real and true sense of the sweep of our history.

Now it’s your turn! Take this reader survey and tell us what you think the right answers are—and see where yours stack up compared to our experts and to other readers. — Editor Michael Tomasky

History—in this case, through the pen of Thomas Boswell—does not record for us the context in which Samuel Johnson offered up the famous quote that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” According to samueljohnson.com, the English intellectual and polymath just blurted it out on the evening of April 7, 1775, providing no context or explanation of what was on his mind. Some biographers apparently believe he was thinking of William Pitt the Elder, and the former prime minister’s frequent invocation of the term.

We do, however, have more thoughts on the matter from Johnson that have survived. The year before, Johnson—something of a mixed bag, politically, but an ardent foe of slavery long before abolitionism became a movement in Great Britain—wrote and delivered to Parliament a speech he called “The Patriot.” It was election time, and Johnson was laying out for the assembled some of his ideas about the duties of public service, and what patriotism does, and does not, mean.

Herewith, just a few choice quotes:

“To instigate the populace with rage beyond the provocation, is to suspend publick happiness, if not to destroy it. He is no lover of his country, that unnecessarily disturbs its peace.”

“Still less does the true patriot circulate opinions which he knows to be false. No man, who loves his country, fills the nation with clamorous complaints, that the protestant religion is in danger, because ‘popery is established in the extensive province of Quebec,’ a falsehood so open and shameless, that it can need no confutation among those who know that of which it is almost impossible for the most unenlightened zealot to be ignorant.”

Finally, in his closing peroration, Johnson urged the next House of Commons to “unite in a general abhorrence of those, who, by deceiving the credulous with fictitious mischiefs, overbearing the weak by audacity of falsehood, by appealing to the judgment of ignorance, and flattering the vanity of meanness … arrogate to themselves the name of patriots.”

As we watch (or avoid watching) Donald Trump trying to turn the celebration of the United States’s 250th birthday into a celebration of Donald Trump, we would do well to remember Dr. Johnson’s thoughts. In wondering what he might think of the president’s ideas and actions this week, there is very little mystery. Let’s review a couple of those actions, as reported by Politico Playbook Friday morning:

• You saw that ridiculous video of Trump “talking” with the AI Teddy Roosevelt? Well, this was meant to be part of a “living museum recreating Theodore Roosevelt’s frontier experience,” as envisioned in a “planning document” from America250, a bipartisan, congressionally chartered, decade-old plan to launch various commemorations. “It hoped to draw 250,000 visitors for a nationally televised celebration on July 1 featuring A-list performers, immersive historical programming, a drone spectacular and, ultimately, the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library’s grand opening.” Instead, it launched with a visit from Trump.
• The Smithsonian Folklife Festival, a decades-old Washington summer fixture that always takes place on the National Mall, was given the boot this year and forced inside the Smithsonian Castle to make way for Trump’s Great American State Fair, which has been drawing fewer attendees than a lot of Little League games.
• Finally, it almost goes without saying that the Trump administration stiffed America250, according to Politico. Congress appropriated $150 million to the project, but organizers have received just $25 million to date. Democrats also alleged this week that some America250 donors were tricked into donating to Trump’s personal semiquincentennial organization, Freedom 250, which is responsible for the UFC fight at the White House and the ongoing fair. (Naturally, Freedom 250 is not subject to congressional oversight, and it can keep its donors private.)

But these, of course, are minor matters that will pass. The real hallmarks of Trump’s false patriotism are the things that make his tenure such a horrific embarrassment and civic tragedy to so many millions of Americans. The constant lies meant to glorify him and his reign. The toxic hatred of so many of the people he was elected to serve. The petty and immoral pursuit of his political enemies. The operatic and open corruption.

These are venal acts. But as July 4 approaches, it behooves us to remember specifically that they are unpatriotic. Or worse: They are aggressively anti-patriotic. Real patriotism is truthful and humble; it tolerates and even welcomes dissent, and, understanding that the people rule in a democracy, it serves supporters and detractors equally; it seeks justice rather than revenge; and it understands that to seek profit from office is abhorrent.

That’s Trump. A treacherous, know-nothing anti-patriot. The image that sticks with me, the photo that made me both roll my eyes and gasp in horror when I first saw it, was the one of Trump kissing an American flag. What a grotesque act of civil idolatry; in fact, let’s throw “idolatrous” in there too. And if you don’t understand why kissing a flag is an act of grotesque civic idolatry, then you, my friend, are part of the problem.

Let’s close with a few more thoughts on patriotism from some people who actually knew it means:

George Washington: “Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”

G.K. Chesterton: “‘My country, right or wrong’ is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’”

Albert Einstein: “Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism—how passionately I hate them!”

And maybe my favorite, from Clarence Darrow: “True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.”

There is still much to celebrate about the United States of America—its art and literature and music, its scientific achievements, its physical beauty, and of course the principles of liberty it introduced to the world 250 years ago and toward which we daily and yearly strive. The anti-patriots do have the upper hand right now, but more and more people are seeing through them. In addition, they are also making real, Johnson- and Darrow-esque patriots of millions who were once disengaged. That is something to be hopeful about, and to celebrate, this weekend.

This midterm election cycle has delivered us a number of unhinged primaries. There was the Texas barnburner between Republican Sen. John Cornyn and corrupt state Attorney General Ken Paxton. In South Carolina, Rep. Nancy Mace’s erratic behavior dragged down her bid to become governor. And California’s gubernatorial primary was upended by a horrific sexual misconduct scandal involving now…

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On New Year’s Eve, fireworks bloomed behind the Washington Monument. Along the side of the 550-foot structure, a birthday candle was projected, flickering as “The Star-Spangled Banner” played. This spectacle kicked off Freedom 250’s countdown to the semiquincentennial and was followed by animated neoclassic-style graphics overlaid with audio narrating the nation’s “discovery, expansion, independence, and future.” As the narrative unraveled and onlookers watched Christopher Columbus sail across the sea and settlers in wagons push westward, there was no mention of women or people of color.

This display, along with the announcement of a UFC fight on the White House lawn, an IndyCar grand prix near the National Mall, and the Great American State Fair, made it clear that this year’s semiquincentennial is more about creating spectacle in service of President Donald Trump’s idea of America than it is about honoring American history. With each event, the complexities that have brought America to where it is today are erased or sidelined in favor of blind patriotism—a celebration of an uncritical American story centering predominantly white men. 

The Freedom 250–backed Great American State Fair on the National Mall runs through July 10. Al Drago/Getty An equestrian performs during a rodeo on the first day of the Great American State Fair. Anna Moneymaker/Getty

But state commissions are also celebrating the anniversary. And some of them are doing a far better job honoring the country’s complexity. These groups, formed by state governor appointments, legislation, and executive orders, are also political and flawed. But they are focusing on their communities, choosing to use the semiquincentennial as a moment to embrace diversity and make history more accessible. This anniversary is more than a celebration; it’s a chance to reexamine America’s story and take stock of those the federal government would rather censor from the larger narrative. 

As these separate state commissions facilitated conversations with local communities, they found that more than any spectacle, people wanted to see themselves and their ancestors in the celebrations of 250 years of the United States. 

In Rhode Island, one of the original 13 colonies, locals know their history and take pride in it. Lauren Fogarty, the commission’s program coordinator, said there’s been an opportunity to hear from more families about their personal connections to the Revolution, including from descendants of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment, the first Black battalion in US military history. Although the history of the regiment has often been overshadowed, the anniversary and one of the commission’s grant recipients, the Rhode Island Historical Society, provided an opportunity for author John Rees to discuss the experiences of those soldiers during and after the war at an April event at the John Brown House Museum.

North Carolina’s commission has drawn attention to the Edenton Tea Party, where a group of 51 women gathered to pledge that they wouldn’t buy British goods, one of the earliest instances of women’s political activism. This history is presented in one of the children’s books the commission created in celebration of the semiquincentennial. The commission has sold roughly 3,700 of the three children’s books. It recently secured funding for another children’s book, this one focused on Martin Black, one of the 14 Harlowe Patriots, a group of free Black men who fought in the Revolution.

In Illinois, the state commission created a free passport, similar to the National Parks Passport, that includes nearly 60 sites across the state, illuminating how “people in Illinois have made good on the ideals of the Declaration of Independence,” said Gabrielle Lyon, the Illinois commission chair. “The idea is to connect things that have happened locally here to the formation of our national story.” They’ve distributed 100,000 of them as of June. The passport includes the Elijah P. Lovejoy memorial for the journalist and abolitionist, who was killed by a mob for wanting a free press. It also includes Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, the remnants of the largest pre-Columbian Native American civilization north of Mexico. 

State commissions have also bolstered the work of the expert agencies and organizations that already had programming planned around the semiquincentennial. “No one really needed a commission to say, ‘Hey, here’s what you do and how you do it,’” said Cameron Bean, Georgia’s commission chair. He said people, organizations, and nonprofits needed to “have a commission that said, ‘Hey, how can we serve you?’”

So rather than investing a large portion of its funds into hiring staff or a planning committee, Bean said the Georgia commission decided to focus on giving out grants, helping raise sponsorship money, and promoting events like the African Film Festival Atlanta, the African American Heritage Symposium, and a musical about pioneer women that uses traditional quilt patterns as a storytelling tool. Jason Mancini, vice chair of the Connecticut commission, said over the last three years, his commission has been able to award over $800,000 to over 80 organizations in the state.  

“We didn’t want to make this about drums and guns. This has to be something more, so that people see their children and grandchildren as part of this story.”

Locals have responded positively to this grassroots approach. It doesn’t pull people out of their counties or municipalities to celebrate somewhere else; it allows them to celebrate where they are. As Ansley Herring Wegner, director of North Carolina’s state commission, put it, locals might “see the Washington Monument lit up like a birthday candle on their TV, but we’re going to be at their events. We’re at their parades. We’re at their soccer tournaments.” These grants can also help revitalize third spaces, bring new audiences to organizations that have been working in the state for years, and reinforce the idea that every place has played a part in this country’s history.

Lyon, the Illinois chair, remarked that this year’s celebration has taken a more inclusive approach, setting it apart from previous milestone anniversaries. She said that in 1776 and 1976, festivities left out many Americans, but in 2026, Illinois was committed to inviting as many voices as possible into the commemoration. 

In Rhode Island, Fogarty said she spoke to all 39 municipalities to tell them about the semiquincentennial. The Utah state commission held monthly meetings at which community members could share national and local updates, giving them a chance to amplify each other’s work, draw inspiration from one another, and collaborate with groups they hadn’t worked with before. 

These conversations resulted in events and programming across the states that spoke directly to local history and culture. In Connecticut, an exhibit of different artists’ depictions of the American flag opened at the Fairfield University Art Museum. Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution loaned the Continental Army’s North Carolina brigade sketch to the state. In Boulder, Utah, a local artist spent 250 hours carving handprints into a boulder to commemorate a yearlong commitment to volunteering.

Bean, of Georgia, noted that this variety in programming is a good way to meet people where they are. The hope is that there is something in which everyone can find value and enjoyment.

Some programming also resulted from more complex conversations with communities about reckoning with American history. Mancini has had a long history of working with tribal communities and communities of color, both in Connecticut and outside the state. So when it came time to plan as a commission, he said the group had some hard conversations with Black and Native community members who expressed that they didn’t feel they had been seen as a part of America’s story thus far. 

He recalled one commissioner who represented a Black community organization that had been vocal about the hundreds of Black men who served in the Colonial militia but hadn’t been recognized. “We want to tell those stories,” Mancini said. “We didn’t want to make this about drums and guns. This has to be something more, so that people see themselves today and they can see themselves tomorrow, and they can see their children and grandchildren as part of this story.” 

Cyndi Tolosa, the Connecticut commission’s project manager, listed other initiatives members had hoped to do to make things more inclusive, such as translating more materials into Spanish and doing more outreach in Spanish-speaking communities. She also noted organizations like Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services, which was working to create dialogue about immigrants’ and refugees’ contributions to Connecticut and the US.

Although there have been positive responses to this approach, some, like tribal communities in Connecticut, still express apprehension. The founding documents the semiquincentennial celebrates refer to “merciless Indian savages,” and the political and legal framings for much of America’s history have leaned on erasure and extermination. Mancini noted that while some tribes wanted to be vocal, others wanted to keep the commission at arm’s length, a sentiment he understood. Lyon dealt with similar conversations in Illinois with many marginalized communities.

“I think complexity is where we need to be and get comfortable,” Lyon said. “And that’s what’s most interesting and important about this moment. So some people want to be involved, some people choose not to. The commission’s approach has tried to be inclusive and specific and historically accurate to the best of our ability, but also to connect what’s happening now.” 

A year ago, after participating in a panel about Indigenous perspectives on the 250th for a Virginia state commission event, Kitcki Carroll, executive director of United South and Eastern Tribes, met Virginia’s honorary chair, Carly Fiorina. As the event wrapped up, the two continued a conversation about Indigenous perspectives and the anniversary that would later evolve into an event in April that will be released as a documentary this week.

It included a panel surrounding tribal nations’ inherent sovereignty and the United States’ treaty obligations to them, a conversation about creating greater visibility for Native Americans, and a fireside chat with Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. Carroll noted that the day was meant to be an opportunity to pause and understand the costs associated with the establishment of this nation.

Having more discussions about the ugly side of America’s history serves to “make sure that for the next 250 years that we are not dealing with the same shortcomings and failures that we dealt with during the first 250 years,” Carroll said.

Despite all the work state commissions are doing, it hasn’t been a seamless process. Some commissions have had to navigate funding shortfalls. DOGE cut the funding of the humanities organization unofficially coordinating the celebration in Illinois. Since North Carolina hadn’t passed a budget since 2023, when it ran out after two years, its state commission had a “base budget” of $0. Both commissions have been fundraising and using their own funds and networks of resources to move forward with events.

“From my view, the opportunity is not just about celebrating the 250; to me, the drive, what keeps me going, what I’m inspired by is the idea that the legacy of this moment is the strengthened cultural infrastructure that is at the heart of the American experiment,” Illinois’ Lyon said.   

Many of the state commissions see this commemoration as a moment to honor the value of community. It’s a reminder of all this country has been through, a time to celebrate our differences, and an opportunity to rely on one another. North Carolina’s Wegner said that as a public historian, the semiquincentennial is about giving history to the public in ways they can understand. This happens through the networks they’ve created, the evergreen educational resources that people can reference, and the highlighting of libraries, museums, and nonprofits whose work doesn’t stop after the semiquincentennial. 

As the Fourth of July fast approaches, the state commissions’ efforts to give texture and complexity to American history are a reminder that America’s story belongs to all of us and doesn’t start or end with the founding—or a fireworks show. While thinking about our history, we can consider what, and maybe who, we hope will be displayed on the Washington Monument in the next 250 years. 

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