BS Summary: This article contains 18 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Straw Man, and Hasty Generalization, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 29.2% saturation with 271 hits. Analysis detected 1,451 faulty-reasoning hits from 929 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 50.6% and a BS Rank of 51% (10,845 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 50.50% of the article peer group.
With the nation’s semiquincentennial fast approaching, President Donald Trump is set to host a celebration that centers himself on the National Mall on July 4.
This “most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all,” as he calls it, is officially billed by the White House as “one of the grandest displays of patriotism that the world has ever seen.”
But true patriotism actually looks very different than the grand spectacle Trump has planned.
Back in 1965, Viola Liuzzo, a white 39-year-old mother of five from Detroit, Michigan, heeded the call of Rev.
Martin Luther King, Jr. to volunteer for a Civil Rights march from Selma, Alabama, to the capital, Montgomery, to demand voting rights.
Liuzzo left her home and drove three days to help.
The first such attempt had been dubbed “Bloody Sunday” after police attacked marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Once in Selma, Liuzzo staffed a volunteer welcome desk, marched across the Pettus Bridge and helped drive marchers back and forth along their journey.
After joining the final leg of the march and witnessing King’s address from the state capital, she volunteered to drive other activists back to Selma that night.
On that trip, Klansmen shot and killed Liuzzo.
Liuzzo gave her life as a patriot in service to her country.
She did so not out of blind faith, but because she believed in the country becoming what it promised to be.
“My wife died for a sacred battle, the rights of humanity,” her husband, Anthony Liuzzo, told President Lyndon Johnson after learning of his wife’s death.
“She had one concern and only one in mind.”
That concern, he said, was to fulfill the promise that “all men are created equal.”
Trump offers a different vision: a patriotism rooted in a martial and jingoistic nationalism that celebrates blood-and-soil citizenship and authoritarian fantasies of cleansing the country of perceived enemies, where some are granted the rights put forth by those words in the Declaration of Independence,, and others are excluded.
But it was the Southern slave aristocracy that became the predominant purveyors of such anti-egalitarian sentiments.
John Calhoun, the South’s great ideologist, called the Declaration’s promise of equality “the most false and dangerous of all political errors,” as it promised to lead to the subjugation of the white majority.
“Taking the proposition literally (it is in that sense it is understood), there is not a word of truth in it,” Calhoun said in 1848 while debating the admission of Oregon as a free state.
This view was even constitutionalized — albeit temporarily — in the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dred Scott, in which Chief Justice Roger Taney declared that Black Americans “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
Such anti-egalitarian attitudes carried over to the economy, where corporate barons made use of them to justify the domination of workers.
In his autobiography, Henry Ford stated plainly that “any democratic conception which strives to make men equal is only an effort to block progress.”
All of these sentiments are visible among today’s conservatives, who claim that efforts to mitigate or reverse past inequality are themselves inegalitarian because they treat the white majority unequally.
Far-right trillionaire Elon Musk warns of white replacement and racial subjugation.
Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who helped bankroll Vice President JD Vance’s Senate campaign, explicitly opposes the universalism of the Declaration, once claiming, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
He blamed that incompatibility on women obtaining the right to vote.
Meanwhile, the conservative Supreme Court, backed by the Trump administration and the Republican Party, ended affirmative action and destroyed the Voting Rights Act on claims of unequal treatment for whites (and Asian-Americans, but only when legally useful).
Trump’s anti-DEI initiatives borrow from the same tradition and are being used to resegregate universities, the military and cultural life.
The version of patriotism Trump hopes to display for his July 4 celebration is rooted in this anti-egalitarian, anti-Declaration ethos.
The celebration is privatized, sectarian and narcissistic.
It is everything democracy is not.
That is no surprise from a vain billionaire who led a coup to overthrow an election, hopes to destroy the 14th Amendment’s promise of birthright citizenship and believes in natural hierarchies, often racialized, of IQ and blood heredity.
But Trump’s sacrilegious celebration provides the opportunity to reject the false patriotism of nationalism and reaffirm the commitment to the true promise of the country: that all are created equal.
Today, the same spirit that led Liuzzo to give her life for her country still lives.
It lives in Americans’ continuous refusal to go along with abuses, injustice and persecution, sometimes at great personal risk.
It lives in the ongoing efforts by the people of Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, Minneapolis-St.
Paul and numerous other localities that put themselves on the line to uphold that principle in protest against Trump’s mass deportation campaigns.
And it lives in the memories of people like Renée Good and Alex Pretti, who, like Liuzzo, were killed in protest of conditions afflicting people of a different race whom they did not know.
They were Americans defending their fellow countrymen and would-be countrymen in service to that principle written 250 years ago.
That patriotism outshines Trump’s narrow vision.
It promises that the revolutionary spirit of ’76 rests in the people.
And to uphold the country’s true ideal, we must fix or replace the frame that failed it.
We are called to remember what another great Founding Father wrote 250 years ago: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
Speakers
2speakers7.4%attributed speech860writer words
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Selected voice
0%flagged-word coverageJohn Calhoun
35 attributed words51% of attributed speech67% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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Analysis
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