What does it mean to be an American?

Feb 10, 2026

That question followed me all day. My mind kept wandering back to it as I tried to make sense of everything unraveling in the United States. And every time I sat down to write, the weight of it all pressed down on me. Not just the headlines or the noise, but the deeper ache beneath it. Being an American, and what that truly means, is not an easy question to answer. It never has been.

Frederick Douglass asked it when he stood before a nation celebrating liberty while it kept millions in chains. “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” he demanded. “A day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” Japanese Americans asked it as they were forced into internment camps, surrounded by barbed wire in the name of national security, while their homes and dignity were stolen from them. Families blacklisted during McCarthyism asked it as neighbors turned against neighbors, pointing fingers in the name of patriotism, sending innocent people into exile for simply thinking differently or refusing to betray others.

And then there are our Native communities, who still live with the erasure of their history, the theft of their land, and the trauma of boarding schools designed to destroy their identity. And yet, many still carry the American flag, still serve in our military at the highest rates per capita, still believe in a vision of this country that has never truly believed in them.

The meaning of America has always been contested, always unevenly applied, and always shaped by who holds power. But what feels different now is that the people in power no longer even pretend to care about the promise. Or the responsibility that comes with it. Do they ever stop to ask what it means to be an American? Do they think about the weight of those words?

Because all around me, I see the idea itself collapsing. Not because it failed on its own, but because it’s being deliberately dismantled, brick by brick, by the very people entrusted to protect it.

And after struggling all day, I finally sat down tonight, intending to write about surveillance. About how, in Trump’s America, people who protest or simply try to help their communities are being forced to live like criminals. They’re leaving their phones at home. They’re carrying burner phones instead. Not because they’re doing anything wrong, but because they’re terrified their own government will track their location, scrape their messages, and twist whatever they find into evidence of some imagined crime. That fear isn’t paranoia. It’s earned.

We’ve already seen how federal power has turned inward, how surveillance is now paired with intimidation. DHS flagged protest livestreams. ICE bought location data from apps. Immigration advocates were followed and raided. Whistleblowers were charged under laws meant for spies. And now, everyday Americans are adapting the habits of fugitives, just to hand out supplies, show up to a demonstration, or shield someone in need. They know the government doesn’t need the truth to justify punishment. They only need a reason. Fear is doing the rest.

Then my thoughts shifted to the halftime performance at the game last night. Not because of how beautiful the messaging was, or how entertaining and insightful the performance itself turned out to be, though it was all of that. But because of what happened next. Because of how fast the hate came. The stage lights hadn’t even cooled before the conspiracy theories started flooding in. The artists, who dared to represent the Americas in their full truth, were immediately framed as threats. Their joy was weaponized, and their presence was politicized.

These performers weren’t chosen at random. They were voices of identity, of resistance, of unity. Artists whose lives and work span borders, languages, and cultures. They delivered a simple, human message: America is not alone. We are part of something larger. The Americas stretch from the Arctic to the Andes, from the Caribbean to the California coast. This hemisphere is not white. It’s not English-only. It’s not singular. It’s layered and living and loud with diversity. It’s shaped by migration, by movement, by music, by shared memory. But MAGA can’t tolerate that. Authoritarian movements never can.

Fascism always narrows identity. It decides who belongs and who doesn’t. Who counts and who contaminates. In Nazi Germany, they labeled anything unfamiliar or unapproved as “degenerate art.” In Putin’s Russia, queerness is banned from television and literature. In Trump’s America, drag shows are threats, and culture that doesn’t center whiteness or nationalism is called un-American. That’s what they mean when they say “patriotism.” They mean erasure.

And then there was where I spent most of my time today, on all the latest developments from the Epstein files. I watched the deposition of Ghislaine Maxwell, losing eighteen minutes of my life that I’ll never get back. Her voice was perfectly measured, flat, and controlled. Her answers were prewritten replies she read out loud. She refused to testify beyond invoking her right to the Fifth Amendment, over and over. What struck me wasn’t just her refusal to answer, but how deeply confident she seemed in the belief that silence would be enough to protect her. Again.

But really, she testified through her lawyer, David Oscar Markus, before it even really began, saying: “If this Committee and the American public truly want to hear the unfiltered truth about what happened, there is a straightforward path. Ms. Maxwell is prepared to speak fully and honestly if granted clemency by President Trump. Only she can provide the complete account. Some may not like what they hear, but the truth matters.” Before adding, “Both President Trump and President Clinton are innocent of any wrongdoing. Ms. Maxwell alone can explain why, and the public is entitled to that explanation.”

But that, too, was a lawyer’s trick, a quiet deal spoken aloud for the right ears to hear. A signal to the powerful: don’t worry, your names will be left untouched. Your reputations remain intact. And Maxwell, in turn, played her role: defiant, guarded, and strangely calm, as if she believed she was the only one who’d pay any real consequence.

It was disheartening. Another day of justice not being served. And another brick in the wall of a system built to protect the powerful and silence the vulnerable. What we’re witnessing isn’t just a crime being covered up; it’s a crime of such vast scale, with carefully protected design, that we’re still struggling to measure its full size. Epstein wasn’t just a predator. He was a platform, a pipeline, and the infrastructure of a network larger than we can imagine. He created a hub of blackmail, money, access, and silence. And it is only by fully understanding that his power didn’t come from what he did in secret, it came from who let him do it in plain sight.

The web he wove runs through politics, tech, finance, and media. It’s the very spine of our modern elite. And the message being sent could not be clearer: if you have enough money, enough connections, and you keep your mouth shut, the machine will protect you.

People ask why survivors don’t come forward and name names. Because this is what they’re up against. An administration that protects predators. A culture that punishes truth tellers. And a legal system that moves powerful people who know too much to low-security facilities where they practice yoga and walk freely, while victims live with the consequences forever. Other countries are investigating, with the real possibility of facing criminal scrutiny. Here, Epstein himself said the President was his closest friend for ten years, and we aren’t just not investigating him, we are protecting him.

So what does it mean to be an American if we cannot even protect children? If we sweep abuse under the rug to preserve political alliances? If truth becomes classified and silence is rewarded?

I think about the women, the grandmothers, the mothers who are still defending Trump. I think about the clergy in my own comment sections, justifying racist memes and cruelty by sharing propaganda that it’s somehow worth it if gas prices come down. People who should be protecting the vulnerable, choosing power instead. And then I step away from my screen and see something else entirely. A stranger letting someone merge in traffic. A neighbor holding a door. People with barely enough money of their own pooling what they have to make sure someone who is undocumented, or scared, or targeted, can eat, get medicine, and survive another week. Communities here in the United States creating modern-day underground railroads, but this time, with food for the hungry. So the federal government doesn’t track them, stop them, and lock them up.

And I ask again, what does it mean to be American?

Right now, we are being pulled in every direction at once. Terror still grips Minneapolis. Voting rights are still under attack. Trump is picking fights with Canada over a bridge that was already settled years ago under Obama, not because it matters, but because distraction works. Because he enjoys tormenting our allies and destabilizing the entire world. Steve Bannon said it out loud years ago, in a 2018 confession to writer Michael Lewis: “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.” Make everything so overwhelming, so filthy, so confusing that people stop trying to make sense of it. Make the fight feel too big to fight at all.

And it’s working on some people. I hear them repeating MAGA talking points, not because they believe them anymore, but because the truth would hurt too much. Because admitting the truth would mean admitting they were manipulated. That a con man found them at a moment of fear and anger and told them exactly what they wanted to hear. And they believed him. And now they don’t know how to admit they were wrong, so they double down.

Tonight, I’m once again tired. The kind of tired that comes from watching the outrage meter max out every single day. From watching things that used to end careers now make the news for mere moments before fading into the background noise. From knowing that we’re living through a moment that future generations will ask about, and wondering how many of our leaders will have the courage to tell the truth and put an end to this madness.

But when I step back, I remember who we are. We are descendants of the people who crossed oceans with nothing but hope in their pockets. The people who survived only because Indigenous communities showed mercy. The people forced here in chains who continue to love a country that never fully loved them back, and those who helped build this country, even when they were treated as less than human. We come from the people who walked through deserts carrying our children, chasing stories of gold-lined streets, not because we were naive, but because hope was all we had. We are them, and they are us.

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