Photo: No Kings Protest, Salt Lake City, Utah, all photos taken by Frank Regalado
The United States of America, June 2025 – As the first day of summer dawns and passes, a five-alarm political fire blazes on, threatening to destroy the nearly 250-year-old constitutional republic. Though its societal complexities abound the choice before the sick and weakened nation is clear. The next step for the country is either an evolution into a more honest and earnest version of democracy, or an eyes-wide-open devolution into a monstrous, autocratic fascism entirely antithetical to its core foundational principles.
In a period lasting just five days beginning in mid-June: a sitting US President attempted to throw himself a kingly style military birthday parade, but the event was an abject failure and international embarrassment. In response, the nation’s citizens organized and turned out by the millions to say together once again: America Has No King.
At a press conference, a US Senator attempted to question the Secretary of Homeland Security concerning the deployment of US Armed Forces against US civilians. The Senator was handcuffed and forcibly removed by FBI agents. And finally, and most horrifically, a “pro-life,” right-wing Christo-fascist nationalist posed as a police officer, knocked on the door of the home of Democratic State Rep. Melissa Hortman in the dead of night and murdered her and her husband in cold blood.
Dear MAGA, your team is in near total control of all three branches of government. Is America great again yet? Or do more brown-skinned farm workers and day laborers need to be deported? Do more families need to be torn apart? Do more American civic leaders need to be murdered in their own homes?
We know right-wing cable news channels and AM radio stations drive their profits by telling Republican audiences they should rightfully despise their fellow Americans, hatefully calling them Marxists, radical leftists, demon-rats and libertards. More recently joined by online entities, this message is drilled into their minds all day, every day, and has been for the past 30 years. For a majority of mainstream American Republicans however, we’d like to believe this hatred of liberal and nonwhite populations in the US, stops short of overt Neo-Naziism, or outright and unvarnished White Supremacy. But we’re not sure.
They justify their hatred of liberals with the standard free market capitalist ideology. But also with batshit crazy conspiracy theories of satanic rituals which involve movie stars and high-level Democrats torturing children and harvesting euphoria inducing drugs from their brains. It makes susceptible right-wingers feel important to have such detestable enemies, even if they’re not sure such enemies exist. Meanwhile, the real agents of chaos, confusion and diabolical evil, are on their radios, televisions, and smartphone screens, artfully inclining hearts and minds toward apocalyptic rage.
The truth is that the vast majority of self-described liberals do not want to force a Marxist, atheist, LGBTQ2S+, plant-based, adrenochrome-sucking-agenda onto everyone. To be fair, however, some of those on the far left totally want that kind of thing, save for the child-sacrifice-euphoric-drug part.
Corporatist globalism, which empowers the rich to legally enslave the poor, is not a viable form of pseudo democracy in America anymore. Bernie Sanders attempted to topple that regime in his bid for the Whitehouse in 2016, but the DNC said no. In 2016 the Democratic Party could have taken on grossly unjust housing, healthcare, and economic policy, the reprehensible US criminal justice system, and the global climate crisis. Instead, it put pressure on corporations to compel diversity training without actually ever doing anything to address fair pay and equitable hiring practices. It decided to talk incessantly about race, gender, and sexual orientation without lifting a finger to make any discernable real-world gains. Black, Latino, and working-class voters took a hard pass on all of that in November 2024.
After the Civil Rights Movement, Gay Marriage, and America’s first Black President, the Democrats big victory today is using gender-choice-affirming pronouns in their office email signatures. She/her/hers. He/him/his. How about you hire more trans people, not call the cops on them so easily, and have a trans person over to dinner sometime?
George Floyd was murdered on camera by Police Officer Derek Chauvin. The Democratic Party, as well as BLM, took that painfully earned social capital and flushed it all down the toilet as fast as they possibly could.
“America isn’t great now, and it never has been, so burn it all down,” says the green haired activist. But nature abhors a vacuum and if American democracy is abandoned by those on the left, the belligerents on the right will forcefully rush in and replace it with something much worse. Which is precisely what is happening right now.
Dear far leftist America, know this is true: There are countless people who behave in more kind and decent ways toward their fellow beings than you. They have no idea what the words “heteronormative patriarchy” mean. And are they not interested in learning your new and ingenious ways to look for and take delight in seeing the worst in other people.
The far left says without an atom of self-awareness, that they, and they alone, hold the one true perspective. No society on earth may be called good and just unless it is constructed to their precise but ever shifting code of moral purity. Trying to force the nation and then the rest of the world to see things exactly as you do is extraordinarily cultish and profoundly delusional. Please stop.
America, tell you what, why don’t you folks on the right please have a talk with your people, and you folks on the left, please do have a talk with your people. While we are engaged in these most needful conversations make sure to stress the importance of the Constitution, of Due Process, of not murdering people in their homes.
And while we’re at it, let’s also discuss the grave importance of not allowing a belligerent alcoholic, unqualified, and incompetent white nationalist man with a huge racist tattoo on his chest… to command the strongest military power the world has ever known.
A former professional wrestling executive should not be in charge of education. A man who swims in shit-water with his young grandchildren should not be in charge of national public health policy.
There are some differences we can celebrate, tolerate, or endure. There are other differences we must never accept and always have the courage to stand against. Murdering political opponents and abolishing due process are lines never to be crossed.
If we do not stand against what we know in our hearts to be wrong, and do so quickly, this might be the end of the United States of America as we know it.
In response to the strange priorities of the Democratic Party, the Republican Party thought it was selecting in DJT a no-nonsense kind of guy who was a good businessman. In reality, they chose an infantile egoist whose go-to business strategies include a list of stiffing contractors and declaring multiple bankruptcies. They chose a man who demonstrably only ever cared about his fame and glory at the expense of everything this nation ever stood for.
In the face of all this we do well to acknowledge that we did it to ourselves. We were all so distracted by the extremisms of the far left, and the far right, that we abandoned the bedrock foundations of our democracy. The human condition isn’t super complex. We figured out important principles of just governance long, long ago. Countless souls sacrificed their lives to enumerate, codify, and enshrine these self-evident truths into law. Stripped of the formality of elaborate language, the undergirding notions which form the foundations of the US Constitution may be expressed thusly: Just governance requires the consent and continued expressed will of the governed. All members of the human species are inherently fallible, and no individual may be entrusted with absolute power.
It doesn’t matter if the individual is a nonbinary, native, neurodivergent, pagan, person of color — or a white heterosexual Christian male — absolute power is never to be entrusted to an individual who is accountable to no one or wielded unchecked by a single political party.
Hence the system of Checks and Balances, the Separation of Powers, Transparency and Accountability. The Rights to Free Speech, to Free Assembly, to Due Process, the Rule of Law.
Questions we pose to those supportive of far right-wing popular thought: do you really think most men speak about women (including their own daughters) in the same disgusting way your man DJT does? Do you really think men who are not selfish and clever enough to lie their way out of serving in the military are suckers and losers? Do you really think the US Armed Force should be ordered to shoot US citizens in the legs if they do not support whoever happens to be president at the time? Do you really think all the moral failings associated with your guy are fake news and that the entire world did not see and hear them all happen in real time?
Questions we pose to those supportive of far left-wing popular thought: do you know that many people of color from modern communist nations repudiate and abhor Marxism? Do you believe teaching your youth to hate America as an irrevocably broken and irredeemably racist nation will do anything to advance your progressive ideals? Do you believe that inviting all white people to see themselves as the enemy of all things just and equitable will ever be a winning political tactic? Do you understand what it means to make the perfect into the enemy of the good?
So what will it be America? An honest attempt at improving a broken democracy? An obliteration of our constitutional republic in favor of authoritarianism? Or burning it all down and hoping something better magically springs from the ashes?
The choice is ours to make for now. But it may not remain so for long.
