When Liberty
Wears a Hood
America
loves its own fabricated fairy tales: the
“City on a Hill,” the “Arsenal of Democracy,”
the shimmering “Melting Pot.” But crack the
storybook’s spine and the stench of harsher
chapters billows out - chapters written in brutal,
ink-black realism, slathered across centuries
with a savage brush.
The question we face in 2025 is whether we
finally read those pages aloud, or keep
pretending the ugly footnotes don’t exist
while another generation of Black and Brown
bodies absorbs the inhuman fallout.
MAGA has an illicit history of
both telling and showing the world who they
are. We just don’t believe them. Why the hell
not? You tell me. Please!
The
MAGA revival - Trump’s encore carnival -
hasn’t birthed a new beast; it has simply
decloaked the same barbaric, bloodthirsty operating
system that has always powered American
supremacy. It’s all so rainy-day-in-Seattle
predictable: criminalize darker skin,
romanticize white grievance, deputize sadism,
rinse, repeat. Watching millions of
flag-waving patriots cheer is as exciting as a
rerun of a horror flick you never asked to
binge - except this time the body count is
your next door neighbor, and the popcorn is
laced with tear gas.
Nazis in the
Front Row, GIs in the Back
Let’s
revisit World War II, a conflict Hollywood
presents as a good-guys-in-Technicolor romp.
On countless segregated trains, Black soldiers
were jammed into suffocating cattle sections
while captured Nazi POWs lounged nearby, legs
outstretched, trading jokes with their white
American guards. If irony were edible, half
the Allied army would have starved - because
nothing better illustrates a murderous, vicious twist
than Nazis being treated with more dignity
than the men who actually fought them.
At
Camp Robinson, Arkansas, German prisoners
snapped up front-row seats to a Lena Horne
show while Black GIs peered from the rafters -
ferocious salt
ground into an already raw wound. In Tampa,
MacDill-Field, brass reworked its mess hall so
white Nazis wouldn’t have to accept a plate
from Black hands. That’s not merely wicked;
it’s devilish, a
diabolical inversion
of the freedom hymn these soldiers were sworn
to defend.
Private
Felix Longoria, slain in the Philippines, came
home in a coffin only to have his hometown
funeral parlor bar the door. “The whites
wouldn’t like it,” the director sniffed,
transforming grief into a heinous, monstrous, atrocious farce.
Only after Dr. Héctor García and freshman
Senator Lyndon B. Johnson intervened as
Longoria laid to rest in Arlington - an act of
political triage performed on a nation that
still refuses the primary surgery.
From Segregated funeral homes,
to camp grounds, and cemeteries - this is what
they want.
The Barranco
Beat-Down: History Rewinds on HD Video
Blink
to June 21, 2025. Santa Ana, California.
Narciso Barranco - a landscaper, church
volunteer, father of three Marines - is
tackled by masked Border Patrol agents. They
don’t ID themselves; they don’t read rights;
they simply pummel, cuff, and stuff him into
an unmarked SUV. The footage - grainy,
jolting, vile -
feels like a bootleg sequel to George Floyd’s
snuff film. You can almost hear the MAGA
Twitter chorus: “Should’ve complied.” The
moral elasticity required to justify that ghastly ambush
would make a contortionist gasp.
Barranco’s
sons - one vet, two active-duty Marines - pled
for justice while the Department of Homeland
Security claimed Dad swung a weed-whacker.
Yes, the feds expect us to swallow that a
64-year-old gardener launched a horticultural
jihad against armed officers. The narrative is
nasty, spiteful,
and mean -
a recycled script where the Brown victim is
villainized to whitewash federal overreach.
Too many Americans nod along, their empathy
dulled by callous,
algorithm-curated outrage fatigue.
This
isn’t an outlier; it is standard operating
procedure when a nation is hardwired for sadistic border
theater. We are told Barranco’s beating is the
price of “security,” just as sundown-town
lynchings were once sold as the price of
“safety.” And every time we accept that
exchange, we grant another permission slip for
more ruthless,
more merciless,
more pitiless spectacles.
A Crimson
Through-Line No One Wants to Trace
These
stories - 1917, 1945, 1968, 2025 - are not
random. They’re plot points on a graph that
always charts back to one truth: whiteness
decides who earns a full measure of
citizenship, and it does so with unsparing precision.
The lines may wobble, the rhetoric may
rebrand, but the slope is forever unrelenting -
downhill for the “undesirable,” uphill for the
“ideal.”
We
keep pleading with a man-made system
engineered, if not strategically designed, to
be cold-hearted. We
hope it might thaw, though its track record is
cold-blooded. We
beg it to feel, though its pulse is unfeeling.
The result? Freedom’s doors swing wide for
Nazis in ‘45, for billionaire tax cheats in
‘25, yet slam shut on the descendants of
enslaved people and on immigrants who picked
America’s strawberries so diligently we tasted
July in every bite.
When
MAGA disciples chant “Build the Wall,” they
aren’t just demanding concrete; they’re
craving a draconian moat,
a visible monument to their beastly fear
that equality means scarcity. Trump’s rhetoric
paints “illegals” as existential doom,
describing them in drought-stricken metaphors:
floods, caravans, tidal waves. The solution,
he implies, must be correspondingly dastardly,
even sanguinary.
And millions of voters - church-going,
flag-hugging, Constitution-quoting patriots -
whistle along as the borders of compassion
shrink to a gated cul-de-sac.
The Myth of
“Proving” Worth
Black and Brown Americans, like
Barranco, have spent centuries auditioning for
a country that claims to cast everyone.
Crispus Attucks fell at Bunker Hill; the
Harlem Hellfighters clawed through the
Argonne; the Tuskegee Airmen soared over a
segregated sky; the Buffalo Soldiers patrolled
a frontier that had just been stolen; the
Red-Ball Express plowed Europe’s mud while Jim
Crow slithered back home. Each generation
marched in hoping valor might, maybe, buy
equity. How many Purple Hearts does it take to
secure a seat at democracy’s table? Apparently
more than America has minted.
Barranco believed raising sons
who donned Marine uniforms would earn his
household a permanent hall pass. Private
Longoria’s family had the same faith. Black
WWII veterans believed housing benefits in the
GI Bill would apply to them. All discovered
the same loophole: whiteness writes the
criteria, changes them on a whim, then pockets
the spoils.
We Don’t Need
Another Commission; We Need a Reckoning
So where do we pour our
outrage? Into Senate hearings? Into op-eds
that bob in the algorithmic tide? Yes - and
into streets, school boards, city councils,
Union halls, church basements, and voting
booths. Power concedes nothing without demand;
history only nudged because people shoved.
● Expose:
Drag every diabolical incident
into daylight. Retweet the unfiltered videos
before they vanish. Teach the train-car story,
the mess-hall fiasco, the Barranco beat-down
in every classroom.
● Organize:
Join coalitions that fuse Black, Brown,
Indigenous, queer, labor, and faith voices
into a single microphone powerful enough to
deafen the cynical sloganeers. TEAM: Together
Everyone Accomplishes More!
● Legislate:
Demilitarize immigration enforcement. Abolish
qualified immunity for agents who mistake skin
tone for target practice. Write reparations
into law rather than academic white papers.
● Vote:
Because the same ballot that topples sheriffs
can muzzle governors and evict presidents.
Anyone who labels voting “performative” has
never read a segregationist’s diary; these men
spent lifetimes crafting laws precisely to
block your ballot. They knew ballots are
bullets in velvet gloves.
Closing
Argument: The Choice Is Binary
A
nation that brands itself “Land of the Free”
while endorsing atrocious brutalities
is like a preacher dipping communion bread in
castor oil. Either we scrub these extreme
contradictions out of the red, white and blue
star-spangled fabric, or we admit the garment
is permanently stained. The middle road has
evaporated.
You
may not want to hear this, but I gotta give it
to you straight, no chaser: We
stand, right now, at a moral fork:
One
path - the uncaring, unsympathetic, uncharitable route
- keeps churning out body cams of unarmed
immigrants, keeps seating white supremacists
in the VIP section, keeps feeding us
slogan-slick lies about shared destiny while
sharpening knives behind its back.
The
other demands nothing less than head to toe
transformation - abolishing systems whose hard-hearted scripts
cannot be re-edited. It is expensive,
exhausting, and messy. But it’s the only route
where “justice for all” isn’t a punch-line.
Choose quickly. Because every
day we stall, another Narciso Barranco gasps
beneath a federal knee, another Felix
Longoria’s coffin waits outside the chapel,
and another generation of soldiers of color
ships out under a banner that still hasn’t
decided whether they’re human enough to honor.
If we will not choose humanity,
then drop the pretense, tear the eagles off
the flag, and stitch a skull and crossbones
where the stars were. At least the emblem
would finally match the history.
