To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.

Hoo boy. Many of us slogged through a July 4 more vigil - "act of purposeful wakefulness" - than celebration as hostages of a dark timeline wherein history's smallest, weakest political "leader" and his racist cabal screech about "godless communists," one-party rule and forced sterilization of brown people who will "suicide your civilization" while masked Nazis march in the streets. Welcome to "exceptionalism," stripped of its pieties. The "danger of this age," notes one sage, "isn't merely organized hate (but) indifference to it."

In the summer of 1776, a few dozen brave men with much to lose who had "watched power gather dangerously into one man’s hands" came together in Philadelphia to pledge "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor" to stop it. Concluding a long list of grievances against King George in their Declaration of Independence, they issued their ultimate moral and legal justification for the American colonies to sever ties with Great Britain: "A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” Today, in his new show, Larry David echoes them.

On this Fourth of July, wrote John Pavlovitz, "Most of us were pulled between the despair of what this nation has become (or always has been) and the hope of what we might still be," leaving us "not knowing quite where to stand." We are "told today by the men who would humiliate us," he adds, "that America was founded in a spirit of innocence, that its leaders never did anything wrong, and that patriotism means insisting on our own blamelessness and assigning all evil to others" - this, in a country founded in genocide that blithely went on to institutionalize slavery and racism, then took to rampaging imperialism.

Despite the right's longtime myths about American "exceptionalism," for decades the arc of our political history has bent toward liberalism and the egalitarian ideals of its founding. No more. The last ten years, and especially the last two, have seen us hurtling backwards, obviously in large part due to the toxic rise of Trump, who "didn't invent America’s oldest prejudices (but) exploited them, legitimized them, rewarded them (and) transformed grievance into political identity." Writes Congressional candidate Fred Wellman, "The level of racism and bigotry this pathetic small man spits out daily could fill an algae-filled pool."

Last week saw some of what it's wrought. Death by firing squad - really - is on the rise: Idaho just became the first state to adopt it as its primary method of state murder, which can inflict "prolonged and agonising death," and it's the seventh state to include it in grisly execution rosters. SCOTUS hacks just stripped legal protections from over half a million Haitians and almost as many Syrians, prompting hateful vampire Megyn Kelly to spew, "Get out. Go home. Go back to fucking Haiti. We know our country’s better than yours (because) we filled it with our work ethic and culture and values. You being here only dilutes it for us."

MAGA ghouls emitted more vicious racist bilge after SCOTUS barely struck down Trump's "BLATANTLY UNCONSTITUTIONAL" move to strip birthright citizenship from U.S-born kids of non-citizens despite a 14th Amendment clearly stating anyone born here, even with dark skin, is a citizen. It was widely deemed a win for the rule of law, but it was also "one step away" from a scary "birthright precipice" that saw four judges construct 100 pages of legal arguments "to write immigrants’ children out of the Constitution and still call it jurisprudence." The ruling was "very nice," wrote Jonathan Last, like "it's nice when a person walking past you doesn't pull out a gun and shoot you...(The) majority followed the Constitution. Yay."

Still, the right freaked out, raving it was "a betrayal of the republic (that) cheapens the sacred value of American citizenship." Sample rants: "We are supposed to be a country, not an orphanage," "Any woman illegal alien who is capable of having a child needs to be rounded up and ejected," the "obvious lesson" of traitor Amy Barrett upholding "birth tourism of China's communist party" is to stop nominating female justices, "Mass deportations. Round every illegal up. Don’t pull back when the lesbian activists start screeching about it," and, "If you see a pregnant foreigner, contact ICE immediately - the future of our country depends on it.”

They want to ban foreign-born pregnant women, ban all female foreigners, do pregnancy screenings for those women, "require sterilization of all foreign visitors before entry," dissolve the Union. Todd Blanche will fight (imaginary) "birth tourism." J.D. Vance says his faith is why "we don't like low-wage foreigners stealing" jobs: "We want normal Americans to be able to live a dignified life, and I think that's a very Christian concept." Texas Rep.Troy Nehls wants a 10-year moratorium on immigration - "We gotta put a big bedsheet over the Statue of Liberty," maybe with cut-out eye holes and pointy hat? - "because we’re not letting anybody in."

As usual, a not-at-all-unhinged Stephen Miller won the Mein Kampf Award by arguing the ruling “requires you to suicide your civilization.” After proposing the case serve as a litmus test for all future judges, he warned - under a Fox chyron blaring “Birth Tourism Is A Ticking Bomb” - that it offers "a direct line into American cash (for) the rest of that child’s life (as mothers) send welfare checks back home to support a whole family." "They can just come into the country, have a baby in a hospital, paid for by you and me, and then that baby is automatically a citizen?" he howled. "And that baby can sit on a jury when he turns 18, and sit in judgment of...me?“

That baby won't be the only one. In The Empire Loses the Ball, a terrific piece about the World Cup, Troy Nahumko describes colonial powers who've "spent centuries confusing dominance with superiority," Africa's "arrival" this year as a force to be reckoned with, and soccer's contempt for and inexorable repudiation of racial hierarchy. "There comes a time when the people who used to draw the maps no longer get to decide what the world looks like," he writes. "The World Cup has become that moment." And Stephen Miller, "a man who has made the question of human belonging his life’s organizing principle," has been or will be made to confront it.

As part of his racist rant, Miller denigrated people "from third world nations (that) on their own would have never invented the wheel, let alone modern technology, medicine, air travel." Hold my beer, says Nahumko: The wheel emerged in Mesopotamia, now Iraq, writing in Sumer and Egypt, algebra in ninth-century Uzbekistan, agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa, the "numerical system Miller uses to count the families he splits up and deports" in India. "That is the birthright Miller calls worthless," he writes. "On the pitches where he would have their descendants excluded, (they) are eliminating European football powers in front of the watching world."

The beautiful game "rolled downhill" from "a damp little island" through oil towns in Algeria, fishing villages in Senegal, barrios, favelas, refugee camps "where the goalposts are flip-flops." "We come from the red earth," said Paraguay’s coach after they beat Germany. "We learned to play football barefoot." Europe long bragged about a diversity that "won trophies for France," but proved "less popular in Dakar than in Paris." This year, nine of ten "shithole countries" - Morocco, South Africa, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Cape Verde, Egypt, DRC, Algeria - advanced. The final will be in New Jersey, "across the river from where millions of immigrants arrived and received the protection of an amendment Stephen Miller would now like to declare worthless."

Cockroach-like, Miller has also declared "divine providence“ the reign of a moronic narcissist con man who, says a report from House Democrats, hijacked and twisted a landmark 250th anniversary into ”a hotbed of corruption and self-enrichment,“ packed with pay-to-play schemes through a DOGE-run, wire-fraud-committing shadow corporation, all ”in service of the President’s ego, political ideology and pet projects.“ The resulting grift and incompetence is now everywhere, from the trashed “Reflecting Lakes” with “criminally-made algae” to the post-rapture-like State Fair where Fox bobbleheads yammered about non-existent “crowds,” there were no chairs, shade or AC in the steamy heat, but if desperate you could find relief in the baptism pool.

Meanwhile, the "festivities" lurched on. Speaking at Mt. Rushmore, amidst millions going hungry, losing health care or voting for Democrat Socialists in primaries, Trump back-tracked to the 1950s and blamed it all on "godless communists" who are "finally making their move," also "illegal immigrants, criminals and everybody that doesn’t want to work,“ who he'll "send into exile." Saturday, in a still-broiling D.C, officials cancelled the parade due to "heat," aka rumors nobody would show, but Patriot Front Nazis turned up to march, wave Confederate flags and chant "Reclaim America," evidently for racist morons with socks on their patriotic faces in 100-degree temps.

That night, back at the Great American Shitshow on the Mall, looming thunderstorms prompted chaos and a mass evacuation; it was close to midnight by the time limp crowds snaked again through security lines and Trump ranted, “You can be a communist or a patriot - you cannot be both.” He bragged he’s taking America’s “Golden Age” to “new levels” and he’d insisted the show go on “so it was even more spectacular (than) it would have been as normalized.” Then they set off 850,000 fireworks - experts had urged viewers wear N95 masks - which made so much smoke it was all people could see. Some said it looked like war footage or the,end of the world; Trump dozed off.

Sunday morning, D.C. officials issued a Code Red Air Quality Alert for the most polluted air of any major city on the planet; some observers wondered if Trump had hired his pool guy for the fireworks. The pool itself, thick with algae and guarded by soldiers, fencing, signs and security cameras, was now also littered with menacing black husks of spent fireworks. "What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?" asked Frederick Douglass, who bared the hypocrisies of this nation's founding. "To him, your celebration is a sham; your national greatness, swelling vanity...your prayers and hymns, mere bombast, (a) thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages."

"Stand out - someone has to," historian Timothy Snyder urges today. "Whenever you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken." For the Fourth of July, who better than New York City's Zohran Mamdani to take on that task, to sit at George Washington's desk among new Americans, "take measure of who we are as a nation," see "an opportunity to begin anew," and join with the city's immigrants, peasants, serfs, those "treated as less than, for whom power was something that someone else had " - to come together in "the work of rendering America, year after year, a little more faithful to its founding ideals." The core of our exceptionalism: Nothing is fixed in its place." Our "special power": "To determine what America means." For the Black woman in this image, for all of us: Not this, please.

A lone tense Black woman rides the D.C. subway surrounded by masked Nazis in an "image that indicts an era."Photo by Cheney Orr/REUTERS/TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY