A Land of False Messiahs, Broken Promises, and Turncoat Heroes

As the US marks its 249th Independence Day, let's consider how the former British colonial project matured into arguably the most change-resistant political system in human history

Timed for maximum symbolic value but inspiring mainly dread and shame, Trump’s abomination of a bill passed right before America’s Independence Day 2025.

It’s mainly about cutting taxes for the rich and downsizing services for the poor and middle class, the bread-and-butter of fascist-capitalist legislation efforts over many generations already (a project only paused for a while in the US when it felt threatened by the rising popularity of socialism and communism, and resumed with a vengeance in once the USSR dissolved).

But there was something in that bill that stood out. It was so weird that it made me feel like it was the real core of the entire bill: the one really strategic desire around which many layers of capitalist bureaucratic boredom were added for deception.

States will not be allowed to regulate AI. Everything AI will be centrally managed by the federal government. How bizarre. I’m going to dedicate a video to (the politically important aspects of) AI soon, but here I’ll just bring up one aspect of this inclusion in the bill, which is very relevant to this piece, as tragically defined by its title.

But first let me tell you something a little crazy, yet more than a little true. It is how all of this began. And I do mean: all of it.

Now, attributing everything to just one event is foolish and something we should refrain from doing generally. I acknowledge this truth. And I am also aware that, once I wrote it (or rather, you read it), a whole process of criticism and qualification I have no control over will begin.

Still, I am walking for months with this tragic, sad realization, and I cannot not say it.

And I think that all of this is happening mainly for one reason, and it is the collective denial, which we all contribute to, of the holocaust committed against American natives for the United States to be erected on their mass graves and former homes and communities.

I swear to you, I can feel this truth in the cool air of a July California evening: the spiritual, emotional, and cultural void that was left when the Cherokee, the Navajo, the Sioux, the Apache, and dozens of other tribes were eradicated: the American landscape is a bereaved parent: it misses its lost sons and daughters; it calls their names and longs for the touch of their children’s bare feet. It missed their grace and music, the colors they wore and adorned their homes with, their loving gazes, and the existence that danced with the land and its cycles, and did not possess, divide, or objectify it.

They are almost completely gone but are painfully present in their absence.

Venture into an American evening anywhere in nature, and you’ll hear and feel it, too. The lost Indian babies will become just as real for you as those of Palestine.

A fossil from the 16th century