Saturday, July 4, 2026

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: Prominent Public Intellectual, Author, Historian, Scholar, Teacher, Teacher, and Activist Eddie Glaude, Jr. On the Larger Critical Meaning And Value Of July 4th in the History of the United States and the Structural, Institutional, Ideological, Political, Economic, and Systemic Hegemonic Power of the Doctrine And Practice of White Supremacy + Global Capitalism And How It Undermines, Perverts, and Sabotages the Project of Multiracial Democracy in American Society and the World

How do you celebrate America’s 250th at a time like this? Eddie Glaude Jr. confronts that conflict.



MS NOW

May 31, 2026

#America250 #USA #Politics

If you feel conflicted about America’s 250th anniversary celebrations, when Black Americans are being gerrymandered out of power, and immigrants are getting locked up indefinitely in detention centers, you’re not alone. In his new book “America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries,” Eddie Glaude Jr. calls this a “double consciousness” that’s inherent in all Americans: the feeling that “America imagines itself as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic.”

VIDEO:

Trump, Musk, and America’s 'Second Gilded Age'

MS NOW
MS NOW

https://www.anativeson.org/p/the-best-people-with-nicolle-wallace

The Best People with Nicolle Wallace

A Native Son - Staff

June 30, 2026

Eddie Glaude believes that, “if we’re not angry about our current moment, something’s wrong.” Bonded by their experiences covering some of the nation’s most haunting modern stories, the author and Princeton professor joins Nicolle to speak candidly about America as it approaches its 250th anniversary — its complicated history and the sweeping wave of white nationalism surging across it. He touches on his new book, “America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries,” whose first sentence is an assertion of his position: “I do not love America, and never have, especially now.” Glaude tells Nicolle that, unlike James Baldwin — who insisted on the right to criticize America because he loved her — he does not “begin with love” when thinking about the nation, and asks a poignant question rooted in his experience as a Black man in America: “Why would you think I would love the country, given my formation?” And yet, however disillusioned, he has hope. “The power of America has always been in its people,” he says. “We just need to get clear on who those people are.” 

VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJJ8kkO-73o 
 

June 29, 2026

 The Best People with Nicolle Wallace
 
As America nears its 250th anniversary, Dr. Eddie Glaude won't whitewash the truth of where we've been and where we're headed. Glaude believes that “if we're not angry about our current moment, something's wrong.” Bonded by their experiences covering some of the nation’s most haunting modern stories, the author and Princeton professor joins Nicolle on “The Best People” to speak candidly about America as it approaches its 250th anniversary.

https://www.anativeson.org/p/weekly-wrap-up-july-3-2026

Weekly Wrap Up 
 
Eddie Glaude, Jr. 

Eddie

July 3, 2026
A Native Son
Substack 
 
Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie reflects on America’s "divided soul," marking 1,000 days of conflict in Gaza amid unresolved global and economic crises. He highlights staggering reports of executive-level crypto grift alongside Supreme Court rulings that enshrine a unitary executive theory and narrowly preserve birthright citizenship. Connecting modern nativism to the exclusionary immigration battles of the 1920s, Eddie urges a total rejection of whitewashed national mythmaking, calling on listeners to find power and resilience in family, joy, and community this holiday weekend.


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Global Conflicts & Shifting Diplomacy

Happy 250th, America! A Princeton Professor Says It’s Time to Become More Decent and Just
 
A brief review and an excerpt from Professor Eddie Glaude's provocative new book.


Fourth of July reading at the lake.Photo Credit: TAPinto Princeton Staff
 
by Richard K. Rein 
July 3, 2026 

Princeton, NJ – We don’t know where Eddie Glaude Jr. will be on Independence Day, 2026, but we’re pretty sure he will not be at the Great American State Fair on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Glaude, a professor in Princeton’s Department of African American Studies, has just published a book, “America, U.S.A. – How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries.” The book traces the unresolved racial tensions and related political divisions that have been a backdrop to every major Independence Day milestone.

Finishing up the reporting for his book in the summer of 2025, Glaude foreshadows the day that is upon us now. He reminds of the establishment of the original U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission in 2016 to oversee the planning for this year’s big event. “The Commission included eight members of Congress, four from each chamber and each party; heads of major federal agencies; and private citizens appointed to the Commission by both Democrats and Republicans. Along with its private, nonprofit partner, America250, the idea was to plan a nonpartisan celebration of the nation that would, in some ways, follow the lead of the bicentennial commemoration. Ideally, the 250th would be driven by local interests, and the goal, as stated by the commission, would be to make the semiquincentennial ‘the most inclusive commemoration in our nation's history’.”

In his second term, Trump undermined that effort and established Task Force 250, which had no limits on partisanship. He was chair. J.D. Vance was vice-chair.

The kickoff event for Trump’s version of America250 was a rally in Iowa on July 3, 2025. Glaude describes it this way:

As Trump walked on stage to Lee Greenwood's “God bless the U.S.A.,” the kickoff celebration of the 250th anniversary felt more like a MAGA political rally than a nonpartisan, taxpayer-funded effort to commemorate the country's independence. Trump rambled for a little over an hour. He declared independence from national decline and over regulation. He lied about the 2020 election, about the monstrous murderers ICE was supposedly deporting in its sweeps across the country, and about the economic benefits of the One Big Beautiful Bill. He told the crowd that Democrats did not vote for the bill because they hate him. “But I hate them too,” he said to a raucous roar. “So, it's sort of, I hate, I really do. I hate them. I cannot stand them because I really believe they hate our country.” This was the rally to kick off the celebration of the nation. The so-called golden age of America.

There’s sorrow at times in Glaude’s writing in “America, U.S.A.,” but no hate. Nor is there any blind love – “no sentimentalized love of country that can easily slip into a kind of idolatry,” as Glaude writes in the final chapter.

If you read Glaude’s book through to the end, as I did in advance of this semiquincentennial weekend, you will especially appreciate the eye-opening passage that begins it. The Princeton Alumni Weekly has published an excerpt from Glaude’s introduction, titled “Bitterness At the Bottom of the Cup.”:

I do not love America, and never have, especially now. It seems to me misplaced or dangerous to love something so abstract and so morally dubious. Love is most often felt and experienced close to the ground — in the life lived in a particular place and time, and in memories that take up residence in the heart. I suspect “love of country” is shorthand for the heartfelt relationships and experiences that make us who we are —­ things that happen in the place we call home, no matter how complicated that place may be. James Baldwin was right: “Whoever is part of whatever civilization helplessly loves some aspects of it, and some of the people in it.” And I suppose that is why, in part, we are willing to risk our lives in defense of this place, and of what it might become.

But in America, those feelings and experiences have always been stained by the ugliness of what white people believe about color —­ that somehow, or in some inscrutable way, the color of one’s skin determines your value. You end up spending much of your life trying to prove to others and to yourself —­ not because you are obsessed with white people but because you want to live —­ that you are not a “nigger.” Some Americans may believe that this view is a relic of a past that we have long left behind. After all, they might say, we elected a Black president and vice president. Look how far we have come. Stop complaining, I hear them say.

You teach at Princeton University. You are not a victim. But I speak from the experience of a life lived in this country, and I trust what I know, what I have seen, and what now sits in the pit of my stomach. Each one of us must face the battle with this place to live fully, and to try to beat back the bitterness that threatens to consume us. It’s enough to drive you to madness. I can still feel the sting of my neighbor’s dad screaming at his son to stop playing with “that nigger,” wondering then what was wrong with him and asking myself what was wrong with me. An adolescent version of a familiar cry arose: Why did God make me a stranger in my own house? Would I resign myself to such a world, or slip into what W. E. B. Du Bois described as a “silent hatred of the pale world . . . and mocking distrust of everything white”? Either way, a wound deposited by a calloused heart made it difficult, if not impossible, to love the country that hurt me. I had to learn, instead, how to survive it.

Bitterness settles in the heart of a child and innocence is lost, because the world announces in stark terms that you, no matter how young you may be, do not belong here. This happens in every corner of the country. The hurt I felt all those years ago wasn’t an isolated incident or something unique to Mississippi or the South. America believed what that man said about me, and that word — that belief — did not die with the civil rights legislation of the 1960s or the election of Barack Obama. Its sentiments and sensibilities have not been relegated to the dustbin of history. Too many lives have been lost since then to believe that. Instead, these ideas about race and about Black people have lurked beneath the surface of American life like a Leviathan. Today, the monster is in full view, eating the souls of the damned.

I saw it with the election of Donald Trump in 2024 as millions of white Americans, and a smattering of others, declared that the country belongs to them. I can hear it in the summary judgments about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI): that, by definition, diversity (and the word always seems to refer to Black people) involves the compromise of standards; that Black people in leadership positions, or students who are admitted to Ivy League schools and elite state colleges, or professors like me really did not earn their place — that any attempt to address racism in this country amounts to reverse discrimination. I see the monster in masked ICE agents snatching people out of their homes, at courthouses, in front of schools as parents wait for their children — people the American government has determined do not belong here. Those who still believe themselves to be the “true” Americans repeat an old, insidious idea about white people that requires a certain view of Black and Brown people. The “true” Americans desperately need, and still want, their “niggers.”

No. I do not love America. I only wish that the country could be better, more decent and just, and in wishing that, I confess that I love deeply those who have borne and must bear the brunt of the country’s madness. Even if most Americans don’t see it, that love includes us all. I have set out in this book to assert a certain view of this country, one that I hope will help us make sense of our current malaise as we celebrate 250 years since the founding. America is at once a nation of laws that reflect, ideally, the equal standing of each individual and a white Republic. Freedom animates our way of life and it is the possession of white people to give to others and to take away. These values are irreconcilable and show that a paradox rests at the heart of the nation. When the tension between these two features of the country becomes unbearably felt and known, white America risks everything, including the well-being of the country, to resolve it. The Civil War is just one deadly example of an unsettling truth. Donald Trump’s ascendance is another: some white people would rather destroy the country than face the doubleness that makes it what it is.

I mean by this doubleness something akin to what W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about in his 1903 classic, “The Souls of Black Folk,” when he declared that the problem of the 20th century was the problem of the color line. It remains our problem, too. Du Bois used the metaphor of the veil to describe the separation between the worlds of Black and white folk, and he detailed the effects of that duality on the way Black people saw themselves:

"It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness — an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring souls in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." 
 
But, to my mind, this peculiar sensation of “twoness” is not limited to Black folk alone. It is the condition, truly the inheritance, of all Ameri- cans. Its beginnings are found in America itself. American double consciousness is the consequence of a nation that defines itself with the foundational principle of the equality of men and, yet, holds others as chattel or resigns them to second-class status. The principle and the practice cannot coexist without contradictions, and to hold them together, as if they can, is a form of madness. American double consciousness is the outcome of a nation that represents itself as “the shining city on the hill” and, yet, sees itself darkly through the eyes of those who have borne the whip’s lash, who look upon the nation with contempt and pity, who inevitably judge and find the country wanting — a ruthless mirror that lives and breathes. It is the split that comes with the American promise and contempt for that promise — warring ideals, from the beginning, that have threatened and continue to threaten to tear the nation apart. America can never fully banish this sense of twoness — and, at times, it cannot bear the gaze that looks back at it in a haunting reminder. Desperately afraid of being exposed, particularly to themselves, most white Americans have been led by that fear, and continue to be led, into a kind of delirium that erupts, repeatedly, in unimaginable violence and draconian policies. They lash out. They destroy or render entire populations invisible, lock them away in prisons, push them to the edges of our communities, or deport them in order to keep the country, or their idea of the country, from being torn asunder. If the problem of the 20th century, as Du Bois announced, was the problem of the color line, and the color line was a consequence of American double consciousness, and that doubleness persists even today, then the problem of the 21st century is the problem of America’s desperate avoidance of self-awareness — its refusal to know itself fully, and the deadly consequences for people and the world that follow from that refusal. Ours is a time of shattered mirrors.
 
Excerpted from America, U.S.A. by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. Copyright © 2026 by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
 
 
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