A DIRGE FOR THE FOURTH

A Funeral Dirge for the Fourth of July

There is no name for what this country has become.

It is not America the Beautiful.
It is not the United States because it is not united.
It is not a republic, a democracy, or a shining city on a hill.

What it resembles now is something darker: a broken nation, run by a self-declared strongman and propped up by an oligarchy of billionaires who ensure that he remains in power. The people, the actual people, are no longer stakeholders. They are pawns. Or worse: they are forgotten.

This is not hyperbole. This is reality.

The once sacred institutions of American democracy, the checks and balances, the civil service, the judiciary, and the free press, have been bent to the will of a man who leads a cult, not a country. There are no “co-equal branches of government” anymore. The executive has swallowed the legislative and intimidated the judiciary. It is government by one man, for the few, at the expense of the many.

Democracy, as we knew it, is gone.
We warned of this in 2024, when Project 2025 was first published, a detailed, unapologetic blueprint for dismantling the republic and rebuilding it as an authoritarian regime cloaked in nationalism and false piety.

Now, in 2025, it is no longer theory. It is a fact.

The government no longer serves the people. It serves the rich-the very rich, the obscenely rich—and no one else. Even the merely wealthy have no power compared to the oligarchs who own the seats of influence, the airwaves, and the halls of power. Meanwhile, the poor, the working class, and the undereducated have no lifeline. Social services are gone. Public education is gutted. Labor rights are vanishing. Healthcare is reserved for those who can afford it, which is to say: the elite.

And who belongs in that elite?
Only those who meet the unspoken, but deeply enforced, requirements of Trump’s America: white, loyal, wealthy, and unquestioning.

Through his weaponized immigration policy, Trump has engineered a racial sorting process under the guise of law and order. He is not enforcing borders. He is enforcing a hierarchy. A racial caste system. A new version of Jim Crow, made more efficient by technology and sealed by propaganda.

The environment? Abandoned.
Innovation? Replaced with slogans.
Science? Silenced.
Faith? Hijacked by the state.

We are not heading toward theocracy. We are already there, just waiting for the curtain to rise fully.

So, what is there to celebrate this Fourth of July?

Fireworks in a graveyard? Flags on a battlefield already lost?
This is not independence. It is subjugation with branding.

Yes, some still fight, those who resist and dream of reclaiming the republic. They are the ones who remember what America could be. But they are no longer fighting to improve it. They are fighting to resurrect it.

America, as we knew it, no longer exists.

And so on this Fourth of July, don’t raise a glass in celebration.
Raise it in mourning.
Not for the America that was perfect, because it never was.
But for the America that once aspired to be better.

Now, that aspiration has been buried beneath the boots of autocracy.
And all we can hear, if we’re honest, is the sound of a funeral dirge.

Let it ring, not as surrender, but as a warning.
The republic will not come from pageantry if it is to be reborn.
It will come from resistance.

William James Spriggs