Today we celebrate the birth of a nation built by slaves on stolen land. Two and a half centuries later, the United States of America still treats people inhumanely because of their skin color, sexual orientation, gender, or religion.

It’s 2025, and we’re going back in time to when America was far from great. It was repugnant.

The MAGA regime recently welcomed 59 white South Africans to the United States as refugees, classifying them as a “priority” and claiming they face “race-based persecution.” They don’t. A South African court has dismissed claims of a white genocide as “clearly imagined” and “not real.”

Contrast the Mad King’s concerns for imported racist Afrikaners with his suspension of refugee programs designed to help people fleeing famine, war, and brutality in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and other places light on white people. Meanwhile, the regime kidnaps brown human beings on American soil, some of whom are just kids and others who end up gulaged in countries in which they had previously never set foot.

One of the apartheid apostles given refugee status has a history of antisemitic social media posts. No problem. He’s white and spews lies and hate just like the Mad King, who labels pro-Palestinian protesters antisemitic so he can kidnap them.

MAGA — a grotesque clan of white nationalists, old-school racists, religious zealots, misogynists, neofascist militants, homophobes, xenophobes, transphobes, greedy bastards, antisemites, and six Supreme Court justices — is addicted to power. The Red Hats crave it and refuse to share it.

Let me introduce you to one: Sen. Tommy Tuberville, MAGA-Ala. He recently vomited a pile of vile when speaking about human beings from other countries, saying, “these inner-city rats, they live off the federal government. And that’s one reason we’re $37 trillion in debt. And it’s time we find these rats and we send them back home.”

(In 2022, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes. More than half, $59.4 billion, was paid to the federal government. MAGAs, such as Tuberville, just passed a horrifying tax bill that will reportedly add about $3.3 trillion to the nation’s debt.)

The chauvinist occupying the Oval Office and his cabinet of Nazis are doing whatever they can to erase Black, Latino, and Indigenous people. The regime started by editing the National Park Service’s webpage about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, to remove references to slavery and change descriptions about the issue and its brutal realities. In the wake of news reports and public backlash, the regime restored the edits, too scared to fully embrace what they are.

The regime now wants to rename eight naval ships that honor the Supreme Court’s first Black justice (Thurgood Marshall), the Supreme Court’s second woman and first Jewish woman (Ruth Bader Ginsburg), a civil rights activist and World War II Army veteran (Medgar Evers), a gay rights activist (Harvey Milk), a 19th-century abolitionist and suffragist (Lucy Stone), organizers for worker rights (Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez), and Tubman, one of this country’s greatest warriors for justice.

On the other side of the racist Trump coin, seven Army installations that were renamed in recent years to sever ties with the slave-loving Confederacy will have their original names restored, Capt. Bone Spurs gleefully announced last month.

Like Ku Klux Klan members hiding beneath sheets, the Mad King hid his honoring of racist traitors behind the fact the bases were technically relabeled after U.S. soldiers who share the same surnames of Confederates. This is what passes for racist wit. Also, according to the Mad King, the regime’s Gestapo can hide behind masks, but protesters can’t.

MAGAs don’t want to share Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day. A white European with a legacy of slavery and terrorism who never set foot in what eventually would become the United States of America should be celebrated. The Indigenous people he and other white conquerors slaughtered and sold should be forgotten.

They recognized Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery in the United States, by whining there are too many paid federal holidays. Let me suggest we erase Presidents Day.

The Mad King had his goons try to physically remove the Greensboro, N.C., Woolworth’s lunch counter exhibit from the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The exhibit features sections of the original lunch counter and highlights the story of four Black college students who were brutally attacked after sitting at the whites-only counter in 1960.

The Mad King has dismantled the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. An April 23 executive order will, in the words of Ibram X. Kendi, an author, professor, anti-racist activist, and historian of race and discriminatory policy, “further cripple legal efforts to combat racism and sexism.”

This DOJ division, created in 1957, is/was, among other things, responsible for enforcing federal laws designed to prevent voter discrimination.

ProPublica has reported the regime closed U.S. Department of Education civil rights offices and fired workers. What remains is an effort to limit the rights of transgender students and rid schools of diversity efforts.

It’s an assault on rights being unleashed across the federal government by good ol’ boy racists.

The regime wants to cancel immigration policy that requires the government to provide basic rights and protections to child immigrants in its custody. The two-decade-old decree requires the government to provide kids in its custody with adequate food, water, and clean clothes. The children being abducted by the regime are almost always brown.

The deplorables dropped oversight of the Minneapolis and Louisville Police departments triggered by the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Both victims were Black. The regime’s Department of Injustice also ended investigations and rescinded findings of misconduct into six other police departments, deeming the probes overreaching. Unlike, say, sending the National Guard into a city that is nearly 50% Latino.

The Mad King recently directed his Brownshirts to prioritize deportations from Democratic-run cities, belching on social media that he wants them “to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.” To reach that quota, the goons are also grabbing U.S. citizens just because they are brown.

The world is in turmoil, the climate crisis is burning our life-support system to the ground, and the cost of living is skyrocketing, but the Mad King is determined to terrorize people of color in places that didn’t vote for him. He and his despicable minions are going after people being paid unlivable wages to care for our elderly population, to clean hotel rooms and homes, to pick our food, and to provide essential services they take for granted.

The Mad King squashed the Digital Equity Act, because equity could only mean the initiative was designed to help people of color. On his failing social media platform, the Mad King raged about the act being “RACIST.” “No more woke handouts based on race!” he posted.

The Digital Equity Act provides money for state governments to expand high-speed internet access in underserved communities. The bill helps rural people, people with disabilities, senior citizens, the poor, and veterans of all colors, shapes, and sizes.

“Dukes of Hazard” collides with “Dynasty” at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Nearly 300 Environmental Protection Agency employees have been targeted to be laid off or reassigned as the regime intensifies its campaign to eradicate programs connected to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

The EPA also canceled 781 grants, most of which had to do with environmental justice. Among the grant money pulled was funding set to address health risks on the Hopi and Navajo reservations.

The regime is stealing money from programs designed to protect the public from being poisoned, killed by the climate crisis, sickened by disease, and preyed upon by the wealthy.

The Mad King has taken a bone saw to the skeleton of this country’s support system.

It should come as no surprise that most of the people who will be adversely affected will be Black, brown, or of low wealth. People here and in the countries we exploit, for their human capital and natural resources, will die.

It’s an extreme escalation of our destructive and inhumane worldviews and ideologies that prioritize the financial and political well-being of moneyed individuals and powerful corporations.

For example, our health care system is designed for profit over treatment and prevention. It’s an awesome system if you are wealthy and powerful. For the rest of us, especially low-wealth families and the many others the oligarchy considers disposable, it’s a complicated mess that drowns us in paperwork and rips us off.

Health care, like clean water and air, is a right, but we treat it like a commodity. Only the rich and powerful deserve it with no questions asked, no job requirements, no drug tests.

A Congressional Budget Office analysis of the various MAGA schemes for Medicaid cuts found that, under every scenario presented, millions would lose health insurance. The plans would have a disproportionate impact on low-wealth and elderly populations. The MAGA tax bill approved this week has been projected to take health care from 17 million Americans. After House MAGAs approved the legislation, a few days after Senate MAGAs did, the Red Hats burst into chants of “U-S-A!”

(Those who make the rules, congressional members, don’t receive free health care, but subsidies from the Affordable Care Act cover 72% of their gold-level policy premiums. They also have access to free or low-cost care through the Office of the Attending Physician and free medical outpatient care at military facilities in the Washington, D.C., area.)

The Mad King also enjoys punishing those who don’t bend the knee. Doctors at Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals nationwide could refuse to treat unmarried veterans and Democrats under new hospital guidelines imposed by the wannabe dictator. The disturbing new rules also apply to psychologists, dentists, and a host of other occupations, according to Guardian reporting.

VA medical staff are still required to treat all eligible veterans regardless of race, color, religion, and gender — at least for now — and all veterans remain entitled to treatment, but individual workers are now free to decline to care for patients based on personal characteristics not explicitly prohibited by federal law.

Hate rules.

As the oligarchs and their elected puppets allow health care to become less attainable, they are making prison more accessible.

Mass incarceration is becoming a for-profit venture made profitable with help from taxpayer-funded law enforcement officials and the accompanying legal system. The United States locks up more people per capita than any other independent democracy — a stupefying rate of 580 per 100,000. The criminally corrupt Mad King, though, is celebrated for his offenses. The Supreme Court shields the sexual predator and insurrectionist.

In 2022, 27 states and the federal government incarcerated 90,873 people in private prisons, representing 8% of the total prison population. Since 2000, the number of people locked up in private prisons has increased 5%. Of the 2 million people imprisoned in the United States, people of color are disproportionately incarcerated at a higher rate.

The Florida governor and attorney general, both MAGAs, had an outdoor migrant detention camp swiftly built in the Everglades. MAGAs have nicknamed their hate project “Alligator Alcatraz,” promising immigrants who escape its brutality will be devoured by alligators and pythons. It opened this week, when South Florida’s daily heat index regularly begins to exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit and hurricane season is a month old.

This concentration camp, designed to hold 5,000 people without papers, will be paid for by taxpayers. Florida will run the facility at a cost of about $450 million annually, with the ability to seek reimbursement from the federal government, according to the Miami Herald.

Gov. Ron DeSantis invoked emergency powers to seize the 39-square-mile site, on environmentally sensitive land, from its owner, Miami-Dade County. Daniella Levine Cava, a Democrat, was elected Miami-Dade County’s first woman mayor in November 2020 and re-elected in 2024. The more than 2,000-square-mile area is the most populous majority-Latino county in the country.

To commemorate their savagery and the possibility that human beings could be mauled, killed or cooked to death, MAGAs are selling Alligator Alcatraz merchandise. These racists sell spectacle and atrocity as a product for their supporters to consume. It creates an illusion of power for the sick. Zip-tying children and forcing people of color into internment camps is a thrill. MAGAs call it “winning.”

It took less than two weeks and millions of taxpayer dollars to build a concentration camp in a massive wetland surrounded on three sides by rising seas, but we can’t build homes for the unhoused. It’s more profitable to lock up the less fortunate.

As MAGAs push to make racism great again and we spiral toward fascism, the other political party lurches right.

The Democratic Party establishment gives lip service to kumbaya and valuing all life. Instead, they perform comforting speeches written by well-paid strategists while trying not to offend the oligarchs. Holding power, even if it is just scraps, and getting reelected is all that really matters.

Much of what is left of the Republican Party is made up of hypocrites and polite racists.

Then, there’s MAGA. The Mad King and his henchmen/women just care a whole lot less about others. They relish being in the position to dehumanize, terrorize, and brutalize people of color, but everyone is expendable.

The Mad King has told Fox Propaganda he would like to deport Americans to a gulag in El Salvador. “We want to do it. I would love to do that.” This week, after his Senate ghouls passed his monstrous tax bill, the Mad King spewed: “We also have a lot of bad people that have been here for a long time … many of them were born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here.”

There’s at least one horrible person who has been here for 79 years we could do without.

The recently passed MAGA legislation cuts taxes for the wealthy and their corporations and counters that gift, in part, by slashing Medicaid and food security programs for low-income people. While the barbaric bill severs social safety nets, it pours $171 billion into the regime’s immigration terror campaign. The American Immigration Council broke the spending down. The measure provides $52 billion to build a wall on the border, more than three times what the Mad King spent on the useless wall the first time. It provides $45 billion for detention facilities for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an increase of 265% in the Brownshirts’ annual detention budget. It provides $30 billion for ICE enforcement, a threefold increase.

Billions spent to kidnap and terrorize pregnant women, high school and college students, scientists, protesters, and sick children. Late last month, the Mad King’s secret police arrested a 6-year-old boy with leukemia who was in immigration court with his mother. The family was there to continue to make their case for asylum after fleeing Honduras because of threats of violence. They found plenty here.

The regime is hardening a culture that normalizes pain and suffering, of both people and the natural world. A toxic environment of cruelty.

We’re living in 1930s Germany and building 1940s internment camps. The beacon on the hill is a warning signal.

Residents in majority-Black Birmingham, Ala., have long been subjected to industrial pollution. The residents breathed heavily polluted air from nearby coke — a carbon-rich fuel used in steel production — plants for decades. Neighborhoods were declared hazardous waste Superfund sites after it was determined that waste soil laced with arsenic, lead, and benzo(a)pyrene, a human carcinogen, from the coke plants had been spread around their homes as yard fill.

Long-term exposure to coke emissions can result in conjunctivitis, severe dermatitis, and lesions of the respiratory and digestive systems.

The Mad King recently terminated a $75,000 air monitoring grant provided by the Biden administration to measure the impact of poor air quality on Birmingham’s residents.

Some 100 miles southwest of Birmingham, the regime killed a civil rights settlement requiring the state of Alabama to address raw sewage pollution in a majority-Black residential area, dismissing it as an “illegal” DEI agreement. This sewage problem has existed for so long and is so pervasive that a 2017 study found 1 in 3 adults in Lowndes County had the intestinal parasite hookworm.

In Louisiana, the regime wants to shutter the Occupational Safety and Health Administration field office that covers an 85-mile stretch from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. This toxic runway features some 200 chemical plants and refineries. It has been dubbed “Cancer Alley” because of the high rates of cancer linked to petrochemicals. Most of the area’s residents are Black.

A Tulane University researcher resigned last month, citing censorship from university leadership who had warned that her advocacy and research exposing the Louisiana petrochemical industry’s health impacts had triggered MAGA blowback.

While gutting the only agency that studies workplace health and safety, the Mad King now wants to burn a heat illness prevention rule that protects people working in brutal heat, picking our food and fixing our infrastructure.
 (UPS and Amazon oppose the protections.)

Transgender people, especially children, don’t deserve health care. Allow corporations to more freely unleash pollution and toxic chemicals and then slash nearly $2.7 billion (a 37.2% funding decrease) from the National Cancer Institute, the largest funder of cancer research in the world. The regime has also canceled $2.9 million in funding for a center at Morehouse College’s School of Medicine focused on health outcomes among Black pregnant women, who have the highest maternal mortality rate in the country.

MAGAs don’t care if people die, suffer, or starve.

Nearly half of U.S. residents (156 million people) are breathing dangerous levels of air pollutants, according to the American Lung Association. Air quality will likely continue to erode thanks to the climate crisis and the regime’s dismantling of environmental and public health protections.

To deal with this public health crisis, congressional MAGAs, following the lead of their Dear Leader, voted to undo a Clean Air Act regulation that strictly controlled the amount of toxic air pollutants emitted by industrial facilities such as oil refineries, chemical plants, and steel mills. The decision represented the first time since the creation of the landmark law in 1970 that Congress rolled back the act’s protections.

Reuters reported in May that food that could supply 3.5 million people for a month is rotting in warehouses around the world because of U.S. aid cuts. Upon retaking office, the Mad King immediately cut global aid programs, leaving food and medicines trapped inside U.S. government warehouses.

While the regime allowed food to go bad and people to go hungry, the Food and Drug Administration suspended a quality control program for its food testing laboratories.

When the EPA isn’t erasing diversity and wokeness (empathy), it’s weakening standards that protect drinking water from toxic chemicals, such as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, better known as PFAS or forever chemicals, that have been linked to cancer, liver damage, reproductive and immune system problems, development delays, and other health problems.

The regime also plans to cancel tens of millions of dollars in grants to scientists studying environmental hazards faced by children in rural America. The grants are designed to address a range of issues, including improving the health of children who have been exposed to pesticides from agriculture and preventing forever chemicals from contaminating food and water supplies.

In a related act of depravity, the EPA is working to trash the team that studies health risks from chemicals. The chemical industry has long opposed such federal research.

Following the lead of their savior, MAGAs in both North Dakota and Georgia have passed laws that shield global agrochemical maker Bayer from lawsuits claiming the German-based multinational failed to tell customers that its weed killer Roundup could cause cancer.

This week’s MAGA tax giveaway to the rich — coincidentally many of them and all those who bought them — will cause the greatest damage to those Americans struggling to buy eggs, pay utility bills, and get health care. Screw the 30% of the U.S. population that lives in households earning less than $50,000 a year. Steal $1.4 trillion in health and food assistance from low-wealth Americans so the supremely wealthy can reap the benefits of $3 trillion in tax cuts.

The MAGA message is clear: Shut up, get sick, and die. But first we’ll need to pick your bones clean, and, if you’re a person of color, imprison you, perhaps in another country, or at the very least make you a scapegoat for our cruelty.

Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.