I’m from the United States of Freedom.

In the capital of the free world, the president now hangs his own portrait over government walls while arresting veterans for burning a flag.

But right now it feels like I’m living in a fascist nightmare.

This week, Trump draped a massive banner of his own face across the Department of Labor building. It wasn’t a patriotic mural, or a tribute to American workers, or even a celebration of history.

It was him. His portrait. His glory. That’s not democracy. That’s not leadership.

That’s dictatorship’s favorite art form. Stalin did it. Mussolini did it. Franco did it. Big Brother did it in Orwell’s novel. And now it’s happening here, in Washington, D.C.

But we’re told this is freedom. Freedom is apparently waking up in the capital of America and driving past the giant face of the president staring down at you like a god. Freedom is when the people’s buildings become billboards for one man’s ego. This is not patriotism. It’s propaganda. It’s the weaponization of imagery to normalize authoritarianism.

And while the banner was going up, an Army veteran named Jay Carey was going down in handcuffs. His crime? Burning an American flag outside the White House. Protesters have done it for decades. The Supreme Court ruled in 1989 in Texas v. Johnson that flag burning is political speech, and political speech is the core of the First Amendment. But Trump doesn’t care. He signed an executive order criminalizing flag desecration because he sees himself as a dictator, not a president.

They couldn’t charge Carey for what he said, or even for burning the flag. But theatrics are their favorite form of power, so they charged him instead with “illegal open fire in a national park.” A technicality. A back door to silence. Because nothing screams freedom like arresting a soldier for exercising the very rights he fought to protect.

At the same time, inside the halls of government, Trump is trying something new. He isn’t just handing out massive contracts to defense companies anymore, now he wants to own them. Lockheed Martin. Boeing. Palantir. The giants of war.

These companies already live off us, ninety-seven percent of Lockheed Martin’s revenue comes straight from government contracts. Every jet they build, every missile they sell, is already paid for with our tax dollars.

But now Trump wants to go even further. He wants to take those same tax dollars and turn them into stock shares, so the government itself becomes a shareholder. They’ve already tested it with Intel. What was supposed to be a grant for American chip production was quietly converted into a stock deal.

Here’s the problem: when the government owns stock, your money is tied up in the success of weapons companies instead of schools, hospitals, or food for families. If those companies profit, you won’t see a dime. If those companies crash, your tax dollars are gone. Either way, Americans lose while the insiders win.

Do you see what’s happening here? Our money is no longer just buying weapons; it’s buying stock portfolios for the people in power. Trump treats these investments as if they are his own, as if by turning our tax dollars into stock shares, he personally owns the companies. But this isn’t his money. This is our money he is gambling with.

And here’s the bigger danger: when the government owns pieces of private companies, control shifts. It blurs the line between who is regulating and who is profiting.

How do you hold a defense contractor accountable when the government itself is a shareholder in its success?

How do you expect oversight when the same people writing the contracts stand to gain from the profits?

That is not democracy. That is a merger of state and corporate power, the very definition of authoritarian control.

We don’t get the dividends. We don’t get the profit. We get the bill. And we get a government more invested in weapons companies than in the people it is supposed to serve.

And they dare to call that freedom. Freedom, apparently, is watching your child’s school close while your money is tied up in the future of a fighter jet. Freedom is a country where teachers buy their own supplies, but the president brags about holding shares in Palantir. It isn’t freedom. It’s theft dressed up in patriotic language. It’s the same story on repeat: they take from us, give to the corporations, and tell us to wave a flag and be grateful.

Then there’s the National Guard. Trump ordered them into the streets of Washington to “restore order.” A Reuters poll showed only 38 percent of Americans support using troops to police D.C. The majority oppose it. But he did it anyway.

I thought about that today while driving with my husband to pick up our daughter. He’s the one who first taught me to see war differently. He’s always believed there is always another way, that war is never necessary. I wasn’t always sure of that, but he opened my eyes. So when we heard the song “Ohio” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young come on the radio, the one about Kent State, about “tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming,” we both felt it in our bones.

Because we know what arming the National Guard against citizens means. We know how ominous this moment is. History has already shown us where it leads. Kent State proved it. In 1970, four unarmed students were gunned down by the Guard during a protest against the Vietnam War. Militarizing our streets has never delivered safety; it has only delivered blood and suppression.

And they call that freedom. Freedom is apparently rifles aimed at citizens in the name of order. Freedom is troops patrolling neighborhoods where families live and children play. That isn’t freedom. That is fear in uniform, dressed up as law and order.

That song, “Ohio,” stuck with me after the drive. “Four dead in Ohio.” Those students were a warning. Militarization of the Guard against citizens ends in blood. Always. And I worry that too many people don’t remember. The population that lived through Kent State is shrinking. Younger Americans might not know the story. They might not see the warning signs.

But we see them. We are living them. The signs are everywhere. The banner, the arrest, the ownership, the Guard. All of it is building. And if we don’t stop it, we will live our own Kent State again.

So what do we do? We support the people speaking out. We leave comments. We share their work. We tell them they are not alone. Every time we do, someone else sees it and feels safe to speak too. That is how courage multiplies.

Trump and MAGA may own the courts and Congress, for now. But they do not own freedom. They can’t buy it. They can’t hang it on a wall. They can’t arrest it. Freedom is ours. It lives in our voices, in our protests, in our refusal to stay silent.

And we’re only seven months into this presidency, and it already feels like seven years. Every day is chaos. Every headline is another attack on democracy. The pace is deliberate. It’s designed to exhaust us. Because when you are too tired to fight, they win.

And yet, despite it all, I feel hope. I see food bloggers turning into democracy defenders. I see travel writers putting down their cameras to pick up their pens. I see every day people who never spoke about politics finally raising their voices. That is what keeps me going.

Every single time someone breaks their silence, I feel like I might burst with hope. They cannot lock us all up. They cannot raid every house. They cannot silence millions of us. We outnumber them. There are 330 million Americans. How many true MAGAs are there? They may be loud, but they are not the majority.

And here is my hope. My hope is that the pendulum will swing.

That this darkness, as painful as it is, will wake up millions of people who have been silent for too long. That when we come out the other side, we will not just go back to what we had before, but we will build something better. A country where no one starves, where everyone has a home, where healthcare is a right, and where freedom is not a word twisted by authoritarians but a practice lived by all of us. My hope is that our children will inherit an America free of Trump and free of MAGA, but more than that, an America that finally lives up to its promise.

I’m from the United States of Freedom.

Not the kind they plaster on government buildings.
Not the kind they jail veterans for exercising.
Not the kind they sell to corporations with your money.

Real freedom. The kind that grows when people come together, refuse to be silenced, and remember that this country belongs to all of us. That is freedom. And it cannot be owned.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

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