Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Declaration of Independence has been made a dead letter by the Trump regime as we celebrate the 249th anniversary ofthe United States of America.
Those immortal words penned by an Enlightenment gentleman, Thomas Jefferson, still ring out powerfully today:
- “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
In today’s America, the regime in power holds that all human beings are not created equal.
Rather, the Trumpian Establishment believes that people are enmeshed in a nested hierarchy of inequality, with white Christian men naturally and inevitably at the top of the heap. Such hierarchies, which reject equality, are the key characteristic of Conservatism, which are taken to even greater extremes by fascist movements. Whether Trumpism is merely a peculiar form of populist Conservatism or full-on fascism is debated by the chattering classes. That it is a racialized form of authoritarianism that seeks to militarize entire sectors of the American government seems indisputable.
Who does not deserve, among all mankind, life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, according to key Trump ally Laura Loomer? She posted online about the new Ron DeSantis Gulag in Florida, playfully tagged with the moniker “Alligator Alcatraz” by the sadists who have their jaws on the nation’s throat. She said the gators of the camp “are guaranteed at least 65 million meals.” Loomer, called “Looner” in some quarters for her crazed conspiracy theories, is so powerful with Trump that she had National Security Council personnel fired.
Loomer does not consider the 65 million Hispanic Americans to be Americans. Some 70% of them are US-born, and therefore automatically citizens by the 14th amendment of the Constitution. Most of the rest are naturalized citizens. Most have proficiency in English. Only 7,410,000 are undocumented. That is only 11.4 percent of US Latinos, slightly more than 1 in ten. Some 20% of the undocumented have in recent years been considered by judges to be eligible for asylum, leaving only 6 million or so out in the cold. Of these, the vast majority are law-abiding, industrious workers making a significant addition annually to the US GDP and paying into Social Security even though they will never collect.
But Loomer does not want to deprive only 9.5 percent of Latinos of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. She wants to deprive them all of it. And Trump is now speaking of depriving US citizens of their citizenship, a process which, however, is governed by Congress and not by the president, according to the Constitution, and there is no provision for doing it over freedom of speech issues, only for fraud.
So all men are not created equal in Trump’s America. Some 65 million Hispanic Americans are not equal, and are not owed, according to this regime, the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Hispanic Americans have been citizens much longer than the Trump family. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War gave Mexican citizens a year to decide if they wanted to remain under new management :-), and some 115,000 decided to become Americans. They were classified as “white,” by the way. Many Hispanics in California and the Southwest are descended from that founder community that bravely accepted the new government and remained to help build an expanded United States. The Hispanics of New Mexico, many landholders who consider themselves white, are descended from those elites who remained under Guadaloupe Hidalgo. Our landlady there back in 1952, who named me, viewed most of the state’s white population as recent immigrants. These are the people that Johnny Come Lately Loomer wants to denaturalize.
The Trump regime is attempting to reverse the Supreme Court’s decision in Hernandez v. Texas of 1953, which held that Mexican-Americans and all other nationality groups in the United States have equal protection under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Mexican-Americans had been systematically kept off juries in Texas, which made them less than full citizens.
In eighteenth century English, “all Men” included women (this sense of “man” is cognate to the German “das Mensch,” i.e. the human being, not to der Mann or “the man”). But with women’s reproductive rights revoked, they don’t have the same rights to control over their bodies as men.
Obviously, the nearly four million Muslim Americans are not equal in Trump’s eyes. The president threatened to strip citizenship from Zohran Mamdani, the winner of the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City, apparently solely because he identifies Muslim (he is from a blended family and his mother is Hindu). Likewise, Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder, was made a prisoner of conscience for his activism against the Gaza genocide. Trump and Marco Rubio do not believe that he is owed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
But Thomas Jefferson wrote in his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” — “The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” [Query XVII, “Religion”]
“Constitution RIP,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / ChatGPT, 2025
African Americans make up 41% of the 1.9 million Americans in jail or prison, but only about 13% of the US population. The laws that put them there in essence continued the mass surveillance practices of the Jim Crow era and the deprivation of liberty of the slavery era. Some one in four African-American men will experience incarceration. They clearly are not seen as made equal or as having a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Note that the peculiar over-criminalization of drug offenses in the US and the use of jails and prisons to deal with misdemeanors and with the mentally ill and alcoholics, all contribute to a gulag that dwarfs that of most other countries in the world. We are more like Iran than like Sweden.
Any attempt by businesses, universities and civil society organizations to redress racial inequities through programs promoting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, is now being criminalized by the Trump regime, in its bid to create or restore a racial hierarchy to the country, where Blacks and Hispanics work as invisible menials in Trump’s hotels and casinos and only “whites” can hope for a Wharton Business School degree. This is so, even though Brown v. Board of Education struck down “separate but equal” facilities as ” inherently unequal,” and therefore a contravention of 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Yet denial to universities of the tool of DEI ensures that the country’s major institutions of higher education will exclude minorities.
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