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What the Right-Wing AI-Slop Machine Gets Wrong About Frederick Douglass
One hundred and fifty years ago to the day, Frederick Douglass gave his “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln,” a radical speech that refutes MAGA attempts to co-opt him.
Apr 14, 2026
Prager U—a producer of right-wing “educational videos” founded by conservative radio host and edutainment entrepreneur Dennis Prager—has recently been in the news regarding its “America at 250” initiative, a collaboration with the Trump White House well described by The New Yorker as “Serving AI Slop for America’s Birthday.” The initiative is one of many administration efforts to conscript this year’s July 4 celebration in its culture war against the left, a war, announced by President Donald Trump back in March 2025 with his Executive Order 14253, cynically named “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
It seems particularly appropriate to reflect on the MAGA effort to promote historical misunderstanding today, the 150th anniversary of one of Frederick Douglass’ most important speeches, “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln.” For Prager U first made headlines back in September 2021, with the posting of an animated video entitled “Leo & Layla’s History Adventure with Frederick Douglass.” While Prager is a stridently anti-“woke” enterprise, purveying a manifestly whitewashed historical narrative, this video was particularly notable, and outrageous, because it featured Douglass, the ardent Black abolitionist and radical Republican, as a self-righteous extoller of caution and celebrant of American Greatness. Like Trump’s “1776 Commission Report,” published that same year within weeks of the January 6 insurrection, Prager sought to co-opt Douglass (and also Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Martin Luther King, Jr.) rather than to ignore him, all the better to promote its right-wing conception of “patriotic history.” Prager did this in a particularly insidious way.
“Leo” and “Layla” are two white kids innocently watching TV when a newscaster reports on “angry” (obviously BLM) protesters demanding the abolition of the police. Leo, put off by a math teacher who strangely teaches about “systemic injustice,” then asks his older sister: “Why is everyone so angry? Are they burning a car? What does abolish even mean?” Seeking to understand, the siblings enter a time machine, where they are immediately greeted—“welcome to 1852!”—by a dapper Frederick Douglass eager to school the innocent children and restore their abiding reverence for all things American.
Douglass proceeds to explain “abolition” by informing the kids that he was himself once a slave, and when they ask him how he dealt with his unenviable situation, he replies: “It was very hard, and I was often sad. I taught myself to read and write... knowledge is the pathway from slavery to freedom... [and] today I am a free American, fighting for all to be free.” When the children express confusion about how the “founding fathers” could have reconciled slavery with the idea that “all men are created equal,” Douglass reassures them: “Children, our founding fathers knew that slavery was evil and wrong... They wanted it to end, but... made a compromise to achieve something great: the making of the United States.” Noting that abolition would have alienated the Southern plantocracy, he explains that “our founders created a system that would have slavery end gradually.”
Today’s anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s dedication of the Freedmen’s Monument is an occasion to remember that our history is not so easily conscripted; that the struggle for a truly multiracial and egalitarian democracy requires reckoning with racism and not denying its existence.
When the naïve students fret about hypocrisy, Douglass explains further: “Sometimes things are more complicated than they might seem, and complicated problems take time to solve... big problems need to be approached very carefully.” He then delivers the coup de gras: “Have you kids heard of William Lloyd Garrison? He’s an abolitionist like me, and he and I used to be friends, but we aren’t any longer... William refuses all compromises, demands immediate change, and if he doesn’t get what he wants, he likes to set things on fire.” He then explains that he is “trying to work for change inside the American system, and that “our system is wonderful, and the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. We just need to convince enough Americans to be true to it.” Douglass then warns the kids to avoid people like Garrison, radicals who “don’t just want slavery abolished, but the whole American system.”
The video obviously centers on a tendentious reading of Douglass’ famous 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” that completely ignores the way Douglass brilliantly shifted back and forth in that speech between identification with his white audience and harsh challenge to it:
But, your fathers, who had not adopted the fashionable idea of this day, of the infallibility of government, and the absolute character of its acts, presumed to differ from the home government in respect to the wisdom and the justice of some of those burdens and restraints. They went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to. I scarcely need say, fellow citizens, that my opinion of those measures fully accords with that of your fathers. Such a declaration of agreement on my part would not be worth much to anybody. It would, certainly, prove nothing, as to what part I might have taken, had I lived during the great controversy of 1776. To say now that America was right, and England wrong, is exceedingly easy. Everybody can say it; the dastard, not less than the noble brave, can flippantly discant on the tyranny of England towards the American Colonies. It is fashionable to do so; but there was a time when to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! Here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers.
In his speech Douglass embraced the revolutionary rhetoric of 1776. But he did not say that the American system was “wonderful,” and indeed he committed himself to working with other abolitionists to radically change the system. And while he did break with Garrison, his former mentor, believing that the Constitution—if properly interpreted to support radical abolition, a big “if”—was a “glorious liberty document,” he also clearly believed that its promise had yet to be redeemed, and could only be redeemed through a broad-based and uncompromising abolitionist movement. Far from disparaging Garrison’s radicalism, Douglass actually literally extols it in his closing words: “In the fervent aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it:
God speed the year of jubilee
The wide world o’er
When from their galling chains set free,
Th’ oppress’d shall vilely bend the knee,
And wear the yoke of tyranny
Like brutes no more.
That year will come, and freedom’s reign,
To man his plundered rights again
Restore...
Douglass’ 1852 speech, a brilliant reclaiming of the “spirit of ’76,” was no kind of celebration. It was a subtle but nonetheless powerful disruption of celebration, and an invitation and incitement to radical action. And what Douglass says in it was perfectly consistent with the equally famous and more radical words that he would utter a few years later, in his 1857 speech “On West India Emancipation”:
Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.
These are not the words of a man who believed that “our founders created a system that would have slavery end gradually.” They are the words of a man who believed, to the contrary, that slavery would not end until it was politically and militarily defeated.
Douglass, like his Radical Republican allies, Wendell Phillips, William Sumner, and Thaddeus Stevens, vigorously supported the Union in the Civil War precipitated by Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election and the wave of secessions that followed it. But he did this not to vindicate the greatness of the Constitution or to preserve the existing American system, but to effectuate a radical democratic and in some ways revolutionary transformation of the American system. And the policy of Reconstruction he supported involved nothing less than such a transformation, upending the Southern plantocracy, redistributing property and opportunity to emancipated former slaves, and enforcing Black civil and political rights. He made this clear during the war in a July 4, 1862 speech entitled “The Slaveholders’ Rebellion,” and he made it even clearer in the substantial essay he published after the war, in the December 1866 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, entitled “Reconstruction.”
But perhaps the clearest statement of this theme is to be found in Douglass’ “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln,” delivered, at the dedication of the much-heralded Freedmen’s Memorial, on April 14, 1876, the eleventh anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination. Historian David Blight opens his magisterial Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 biography, Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom, with Douglass’s delivery of this speech, pointing out that the dedication had been declared a national holiday; that the event was attended by “a distinguished array of guests” that included President Ulysses S. Grant and many members of Congress and the Supreme Court; and that the entire event held a special meaning for the “huge crowd, largely African-American,” who were present not simply to commemorate Lincoln’s role in Emancipation, but to celebrate a Black-financed and produced monument whose dedication featured the most prominent Black man in the country.
As in his more famous 1852 “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” delivered as abolitionist sentiment was picking up steam, Douglass begins this speech in a spirit of civic communion. Invoking “the sentiment of gratitude and appreciation,” he reminds his audience of the history that made the Freedmen’s Memorial possible:
I refer to the past not in malice, for this is no day for malice; but simply to place more distinctly in front the gratifying and glorious change which has come both to our white fellow-citizens and ourselves, and to congratulate all upon the contrast between now and then; the new dispensation of freedom with its thousand blessings to both races, and the old dispensation of slavery with its ten thousand evils to both races—white and black.
Yet he then proceeds to note that “truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.”
In a speech whose overall purpose is the celebration of a vision of multiracial and universal citizenship, a vision that still remained far from realization, Douglass—the fugitive slave who had become both symbol and tribune of liberation—refuses to erase the very divisive question of race and racial identity. He insists that Lincoln “was preëminently the white man’s President,” and proceeds to outline the many ways, over time, that Lincoln had prioritized the Constitution, and the Union, over abolition, and the emancipation of Black Americans:
The race to which we belong were not the special objects of his consideration. Knowing this, I concede to you, my white fellow-citizens, a preëminence in this worship at once full and supreme... You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity. To you it especially belongs to sound his praises, to preserve and perpetuate his memory, to multiply his statues, to hang his pictures high upon your walls, and commend his example, for to you he was a great and glorious friend and benefactor. Instead of supplanting you at his altar, we would exhort you to build high his monuments; let them be of the most costly material, of the most cunning workmanship; let their forms be symmetrical, beautiful, and perfect; let their bases be upon solid rocks, and their summits lean against the unchanging blue, overhanging sky, and let them endure forever! But... in the fullness of your just and patriotic devotion... we entreat you to despise not the humble offering we this day unveil to view; for while Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a bondage, according to Jefferson, one hour of which was worse than ages of the oppression your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose.
In his speech, Douglass recounts the many ways that Lincoln was despised, both by defenders of slavery who thought him an abolitionist, and by abolitionists who thought him too willing to compromise with the defenders of slavery. He describes Lincoln’s assassination as an awful crime against a great man and against the freedom that Lincoln’s presidency ultimately symbolized.
And while refusing to ignore Lincoln’s flaws, Douglass insists that “we”—he is referring here to Black Americans like himself—“We were able to take a comprehensive view of Abraham Lincoln, and to make reasonable allowance for the circumstances of his position. We saw him, measured him, and estimated him... by a broad survey, in the light of the stern logic of great events, and in view of that divinity which shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will, we came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln.”
Recalling his joy upon learning of Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation,” his pride at the masses of Black soldiers that Lincoln had eventually mobilized to serve in the Union Army, and his determination to continue the struggle for freedom that Lincoln had advanced through his leadership in the Civil War, Douglass closed his oration with a sober appreciation of the fact that Lincoln’s very limits had perhaps been the very source of his strength. Noting that Lincoln “shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race,” and that this had long made him an uncertain ally and sometimes even an opponent, Douglass concludes:
Looking back to his times and to the condition of his country, we are compelled to admit that this unfriendly feeling on his part may be safely set down as one element of his wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict. His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful coöperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen... The honest and comprehensive statesman, clearly discerning the needs of his country, and earnestly endeavoring to do his whole duty, though covered and blistered with reproaches, may safely leave his course to the silent judgment of time...But now behold the change: the judgment of the present hour is, that taking him for all in all, measuring the tremendous magnitude of the work before him, considering the necessary means to ends, and surveying the end from the beginning, infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln.
As Blight observes: “Douglass employed a stunning level of directness for such a ceremony... In the rhetorical twists and turns of this complex speech, Douglass had one overriding target—the declension and betrayal of Reconstruction in the South by the federal government.” Speaking only months before the Declaration’s July 4 centennial anniversary, Douglass well understood how vulnerable was the halting progress achieved by Reconstruction. Indeed, within a year, the infamous Compromise of 1877 was effected, Rutherford B. Hayes was inaugurated president, and federal troops were finally withdrawn from formerly Confederate states, sealing the death of Reconstruction, a wave of racist violence and intimidation, and the resumption of white supremacy.
And so Douglass, on April 16, 1888—almost 12 years to the day of his Freedmen’s Monument speech—delivered another speech in the nation’s capital, describing the indignities and oppressions of the Jim Crow system as a betrayal of the promise of Reconstruction, and declaring that “I Denounce This Emancipation as a Tremendous Fraud.”
We are now living through another tremendous fraud—a Trump administration intent on destroying the rule of law, an independent civil society, and the safeguards that protect free and fair democratic elections, all in the name of an increasingly hollow vision of “American Greatness” resting on what David Blight and James Grossman have rightly called a “brutish assault on history.”
Today’s anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s dedication of the Freedmen’s Monument is an occasion to remember that our history is not so easily conscripted; that the struggle for a truly multiracial and egalitarian democracy requires reckoning with racism and not denying its existence; and that if American greatness means anything, it means the example of figures like Douglass, who persistently fought against both injustice and the celebratory cant typically invoked to reinforce it. And as we prepare ourselves for the ostentatious displays of patriotism that Trump has planned for us this coming July, we can do no better than to recall what Douglass said about an earlier July 4: “To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! Here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers.”
Thanks to Bob Ivie for his helpful comments on this essay.
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Renee Good Died From the Kind of State Violence Our Founders Warned Against
When state authority stops serving the people but instead lords over them, stops being questioned by the media and the people, and stops fearing consequences because it lives behind a shield of immunity, a police state is inevitable.
Jan 09, 2026
When I read that the young mother who was executed at point-blank range by one of President Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement goons on Wednesday was named Renee Nicole Good, it sent a chill down my spine.
As the pain and outrage was washing through me, it also struck me as almost too much of a coincidence that she was there protesting state violence and Ben Franklin had been using the name “Silence Dogood”—as in “Do Good”—to warn American colonists about the very same dangers of state violence.
When 16-year-old Franklin slipped his first Silence Dogood essay under the door of his brother’s print shop in 1722, America had few police departments, no body cameras, no qualified immunity, and few militarized patrols prowling city streets. But young Franklin already understood the danger.
Writing as a fictional widow, Franklin warned that “nothing makes a man so cruel as the sense of his own superiority.” The remark was in the context of self-important ministers, magistrates, and petty officials, but he was also talking about raw state power itself as we saw with the execution of Renee Nicole Good.
If we want to live in the democratic republic Franklin, Paine, and Madison imagined where power is given by “the consent of the governed,” then outrage isn’t enough.
Power that is insulated, Franklin taught, answers only to itself and believes its very authority excuses the violence it uses.
Franklin’s insight didn’t die on the printed page but, rather, became the moral backbone of the American Revolution. As Do-Good, he repeatedly cautioned us that power breeds cruelty when it’s insulated from consequence, that authority becomes violent when it believes itself superior, and that free speech is usually the first casualty of abusive rule.
In "Essay No. 6", in 1722, Dogood wrote:
Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech.
Renee Nicole Good was on that Minneapolis street to express her freedom of speech, her outrage at the crimes, both moral and legal, being committed by ICE on behalf of Donald Trump, Tom Homan, Kristi Noem, and Stephen Miller.
Thomas Paine took Franklin’s warning and sharpened it into a blade. Government, Paine said, is a “necessary evil” but when it turns its legally authorized violence against its own people, it becomes “intolerable.” Authority doesn’t legitimize force, Paine argued; instead, the ability to use force without accountability inevitably corrupts authority.
And here we are. This is the ninth time ICE agents have shot into a person‘s car, and the second time they’ve killed somebody in the process.
For Paine, violence by agents of the state isn’t an aberration, it’s the default outcome when power concentrates without clear accountability. Where Franklin warned about cruelty born of a sense of superiority (as armed, masked white ICE officers search for brown people as if they were the Klan of old), Paine warned us that force will always be directed against the governed unless that power is aggressively constrained.
James Madison—the “Father of the Constitution”—then took both men at their word. He didn’t design a constitution that assumed virtue; instead, he designed one that assumed abuse.
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” he wrote in Federalist 51, adding, “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
Because we and our politicians and police aren’t angels, Madison pointed out, state power must be restrained, divided, watched, and continuously challenged. Which is why the Framers of the Constitution adopted the checks-and-balances system—splitting the government into three co-equal parts—that Montesquieu recommended, based on what he had learned from the Iroquois (as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Democracy).
Franklin himself became even clearer about the threat of unaccountable state-imposed violence as he aged. Governments, he repeatedly warned, always claim violence is necessary for safety and we saw that Wednesday when puppy-killer Kristi Noem claimed that Renee Good was a “domestic terrorist.” Her comment is the perfect illustration of Franklin’s assertion that state violence, once normalized, always tries to claim justification.
To add insult to murder, Trump pathetically waddled over to his Nazi-infested social media site and claimed:
The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital… [T]he reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis.”
Silence Dogood would have confronted him head-on, as she-Franklin repeatedly did with the petty, self-important officials of colonial New England. He repeatedly noted that surrendering liberty for a little temporary security not only doesn’t prevent state brutality but actually it invites it. In a 1759 letter, Franklin explicitly warned us about men like Donald Trump and the siren song of “law and order”:
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Once a state teaches its agents that force is the solution, force becomes their habit. That’s how police states are formed out of democracies, as the citizens of Russia, Hungary, and Venezuela have all learned. And now, it appears, we’re learning as America becomes the world’s most recent police state.
This isn’t an uniquely American problem: It’s older than our republic. And Franklin told us exactly how it happens: When state authority stops serving the people but instead lords over them, stops being questioned by the media and the people, and stops fearing consequences because it lives behind a shield of immunity, a police state is inevitable.
As Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz noted Wednesday, the killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis wasn’t a “tragic anomaly.” It was the predictable outcome of systems Franklin would have recognized instantly; the kind of corrupt strongman systems that reward domination, excuse cruelty, and punish dissent.
Trump wants us on the “radical left” to shut up and go away. But Ben Franklin taught us that silence in the face of power isn’t neutrality but is, instead, an extension of permission. He wrote as Silence Dogood precisely because he understood that abuse flourishes when citizens turn their eyes away and lower their voices.
If we want to live in the democratic republic Franklin, Paine, and Madison imagined where power is given by “the consent of the governed,” then outrage isn’t enough. We must demand accountability, insist on transparency, and refuse to accept state violence and a firehose of official lies as the price of order.
Three centuries ago, a teenage printer’s apprentice warned us that silence enables abuse. He was right then. He is right now.
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We Didn't Fight a Revolution for a King
Why presidential power should worry every American.
Jul 04, 2025
The Fourth of July marks the day America declared our independence from the idea that one man should hold unchecked power over an entire people and from a system that placed loyalty to the crown above fairness, above freedom, and above the law. That's the kind of government America's founding fathers risked their lives to overthrow.
Alexander Hamilton summed it up in Federalist No. 47, which most readers were required to read in high school, "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." President Donald Trump does not wear a crown, but some of his unilateral, unconstitutional actions—past and planned—echo the exact abuses that America's founders opposed. And whether you support him or not, this should give you pause.
I say this as someone not looking to insult or belittle anyone's vote. Millions of Americans supported Trump in 2024 for valid reasons. Many voters simply felt he was the better of two flawed choices. But if you're one of those Americans—someone who voted for Trump but doesn't want to see one man hold all the power—this message is for you.
A system that allows one person to "do whatever I want" is only comforting if you always agree with that person.
The Founders didn't just oppose King George III because of taxes or trade. They rejected the very idea that one man should rule without real accountability. The Declaration of Independence laid out a vision of a republic in which power is limited, divided, and checked.
Our system was built with friction on purpose—three co-equal branches, independent agencies, freedom of the press, and state sovereignty—all to prevent the rise of a single ruler.
Donald Trump has stated that Article II of the Constitution gives him "the right to do whatever I want as president."
Maybe you trust Trump with that power. Maybe you think he is using it wisely, or at least in your interests by abducting college students off of city streets because of their speech, cutting off federal funds to universities that refuse to cede academic freedom to the government, summarily stripping away birthright citizenship from children born in our nation, starting a war with another nation without any justification or congressional authorization, and funding a genocide in clear violation of U.S law. But what about the next president who runs with this precedent and goes even further? Or the one after that? A system that allows one person to "do whatever I want" is only comforting if you always agree with that person.
Many Americans, especially Republicans, have historically been skeptical of big government and concentrated power—and rightly so. Because when power gets centralized, it never stays in the hands of just one party.
Presidents of both parties have tested boundaries. But what President Trump proposes goes further: He's not testing the guardrails—he's removing them. And he's doing it while promising "retribution" and calling political opponents "enemies of the state."
The Declaration of Independence includes 27 grievances against King George III. Among them: obstructing justice, making judges dependent on his will alone, keeping standing armies under his personal command, manipulating elections, and using public offices as instruments of personal loyalty.
Read those carefully and reflect on the last few months.
As a Muslim, I'm also reminded that the warning against absolute authority isn't just a constitutional principle—it's a moral one. In Islam, power is a trust (amanah), not a privilege, and leaders are servants accountable to those they lead—and to God. Yusuf ben Ali, whose name appears in a revolutionary war era military muster role, is just one example of Muslims risking all for American ideals.
The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said, "Every one of you is a shepherd, and every one of you is responsible for his flock." American Muslims know what it's like when government power turns its gaze on a single community—through surveillance, profiling, and fear-mongering. That's why we are especially sensitive to executive overreach. Because when power becomes personal, the Constitution becomes optional.
Too often, we treat criticism of a president as disloyalty. But that's not how the Founders saw it. They built a system where debate, dissent, and accountability were patriotic. Where allegiance is owed to the Constitution—not to a man.
We can and should insist on a system where no one—left or right—can ignore the law, silence opponents, or rig the system for personal gain.
The Founders gave us a framework strong enough to withstand kings, tyrants, and demagogues—but only if we choose to uphold it. We uphold it by not letting any president—Trump, Joe Biden, or the next one—rule without limits. And that's something every American—no matter who you voted for—should stand up and defend.
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