On stolen sovereignty and Americans fighting back
By Sarah Kendzior | July 4, 2026
It is the 250th anniversary of St Louis and the city is covered in cakes and police tape.
The cakes are colorful plastic creations placed at local landmarks in early 2014, before officials knew St. Louis’ tourist rush would consist of reporters and activists and militias drawn to mass protests over the police murder of teenager Michael Brown.
St. Louis turned 250 the year the Ferguson uprising gripped the nation. Americans were more innocent back in 2014. We still believed that exposure brought accountability. So we exposed the police, we exposed the system, and we exposed ourselves — to tear gas, to exploitation, to betrayal. We used new technology sold as liberation: the same apps that serve as technofascist tracking tools now.
It’s been a long twelve years.
The 2026 Fourth of July festivities mark my second go-round with a 250th birthday celebration in a violent police state. No one can say I don’t know how to party like an American.
* * *
Vanilla Ice was the last performer to leave Donald Trump’s empty Freedom 250 stage. The concert was canceled, not him: he merely took heed, like a lyrical poet, leaving us but chumps waxed like candles.
The story of America in 2026 is that everyone can get canceled except Donald Trump and Vanilla Ice. If someone told you that in 1990, you’d assume that the Soviets won the Cold War, and maybe they did.
Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Americans still know “Ice, Ice, Baby”: from Gen Z teens who use it as a theme for Tik-Tok videos of ICE abuses to my generation, who learned from Vanilla Ice that “anything less than the best is a felony.” Trump is less than the best and a felon so he became the president twice.
Will it ever stop? the public cries. Yo, I don’t know, the Democrats say.
That’s been the official Democrat line for a decade. They are supposed to be impeaching Trump, or arresting Trump, or time-traveling to the first term when there was ample opportunity to stop Trump and his mafia cohort, but they are busy holding a party: a uniparty.
Like Vanilla Ice, the uniparty is a one-hit wonder that plays the same track for decades. One set of donors, two sides of a counterfeit coin, and interlocking roles as GOP abuser and Dem enabler. When policies beneficial to the American people are on the verge of being passed, a “rotating villain” appears to annihilate public hope.
Congress does this dance of fake public service as well as I do the “Ice, Ice, Baby” routine I learned in seventh-grade gym: a shuffle by people way too old to be doing it, but who can still perform on command.
Who is the audience? That’s the 21st century question. It’s not the American public, who hold both parties in seething low regard and whose fate is decreed by unelected courts. Over the last decade, we lost civil rights, voting rights, and the right to free assembly. Members of Congress narrate our lost rights like passive spectators.
They are not working for us and that’s nothing new. The new part is the unified willingness to sell out our country to a foreign state — and not bother to hide it.
* * *
The most galling aspect of Trump’s 250th anniversary of America is not the nazi-chintz decor or half-assed state fair. We have come to expect shock value and the desecration of US culture from this regime. Why would they honor a country they are selling for parts? Why please a people whom they see as, at best, pawns in a mass delusion, and, at worst, obstacles to be removed by force?
Their real offense is the celebration of independence that we no longer have. For on the 250th anniversary of its freedom, the US government has surrendered its sovereignty.
The new owners of the US are transnational actors. Their goal is not to rule, but to mine. Technofascists like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk shape the course of American life more than elected officials. Plutocrats with multiple passports and offshore accounts suck the marrow from a skeletal US economy. The biggest new industry is AI, a project aimed at destroying American land to build a facsimile of American life.
Trump gets blamed, but he’s an inflatable tube dude at a mafia chop shop. His apathy to governance is mistaken for sway. Governing was never the point. Trump’s casual treason has always made him an ideal vessel for America’s going-out-of-business sale.
The buyers are foreign and domestic, but one looms above all. One that demands from Americans both taxation and representation — for their wars, their genocide, their demands that US laws on speech and assembly be shaped around their desires, US independence be damned.
The uniparty’s fealty lies with Israel.
For over a decade, top US officials have declared their allegiance to Israel with a fear and ferocity that far outweighs their concern for American life. AIPAC funds US candidates — including seditionists — to the point that US representatives no longer serve their districts, but a foreign country. Unlike every other foreign lobbying group, AIPAC is not required to register under FARA, despite a history of espionage.
The few representatives that oppose funding Israel — whether a right-wing libertarian like Thomas Massie or a left-wing Ferguson activist like Cori Bush — are ousted through smear campaigns and massive donations to candidates selected for their obedience to the lobby. American civilians who criticize Israel’s wars risk losing their jobs, particularly if they work in education, media, or law. Jewish-Americans who criticize the Israeli government are deemed traitors: to Israel.
America has never been a free country, but not since 1775 has it been less of a sovereign one.
* * *
Americans of all backgrounds despise this betrayal. Approval for Israel has plunged since the live-streamed massacre of Palestinians — including tens of thousands of children — followed by Israel pulling a semi-reluctant US into a losing war with Iran.
Awareness of IDF brutality has soared since 2014, when smartphones became widely available and Palestinian documentation transformed worldwide perception of Israeli rule. Netanyahu sneeringly dismissed murdered Palestinian children as “the telegenically dead” but he realized the internet posed a problem. It told the truth.
The solution: murder the witnesses, muzzle the internet, and control the country in between: The US, home to Silicon Valley, billion-dollar aid packages to Israel, and lonely but powerful backing against war crime investigatory bodies like the ICC.
This week marks both 250 years of US “independence” and 1000 days of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. The latter milestone is more important.
The Democratic establishment is shocked by recent primary wins by leftist candidates who condemn Israel’s atrocities. This includes the 2025 win of Zohran Mamdani, who then helped Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Claire Valdez achieve victories in New York in 2026; followed by Melat Kiros, a Colorado lawyer who lost her job in 2023 for defending Palestinian rights only to oust a politician who had been in office since 1997, the year Kiros was born.
If elected, which is likely, they will join Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and a handful of other representatives who oppose unconditional aid to Israel yet have not been ousted by the Israeli lobby. Some of the previously ousted, like Missouri’s Cori Bush, are attempting to return to office. What is often framed as a “NYC matter” was always a national cause with heartland representation.
The Democratic establishment is surprised by the increase in enthusiasm, especially among youth, for the 2026 slate over 2024. They shouldn’t be. Voter motivation never came down to “Vote Blue No Matter Who” but “Vote Blue No Matter What”. In 2026, the “what” is a genocide of children and Democratic voters refuse to abide it. Given an alternative who is not a Republican, they will vote for them.
Not defending the murder of children will help a candidate win a US election. It’s also the lowest baseline of morality a human being could have. The GOP and the Democrats value neither prerogative. That they act in lockstep to their own detriment, indifferent to public will but deferential to Israel, shows the loss of US sovereignty.
The leftist winning candidates highlighted other assaults on American freedom — they seek to abolish ICE, for example, as it terrorizes US citizens — while proposing to invest in the well-being of Americans: healthcare, schools, affordable housing. These are not radical acts unless you live in a country with a government that sees serving its own citizens as a radical proposition. The current US government does.
People balk at “America First”, a phrase coopted by fascists a century ago. But putting America first when you are representing America is not only the literal job, but an act of assurance to Americans facing xenophobic assault. Real “America first” is honoring birthright citizenship, where everyone born in America is considered American: a foundational precept that hangs by a thread thanks to a corrupt Supreme Court.
SCOTUS is one of the worst threats to US freedom. Yet pundits bray that the real threat are young Democratic socialists, many Muslim or Latino, who put America first. They put the needs of fellow Americans before the needs of Israel and its lobby.
Their devotion to the American public should move you, because they grew up in a US that betrayed them, over and over, and they did not give up on it like the officials they ran against did.
* * *
As Americans are told to celebrate 250 years of “No taxation without representation”, the US government is moving toward its most blatant surrender of sovereignty yet: the merger of the US and Israeli militaries.
The United States-Israel FUTURES Act, also known as Section 224 and Section 219, proposes to merge the two armies under the grounds of “network integration” and “data fusion”. US intelligence will become Israeli intelligence: legally, this time. Policy on Israel will not be a matter of choice but a structural feature of joint military programs. Should Israel go to war, the US may be formally bound to go with it: a horrific prospect as Netanyahu vows that Israel’s wars will never end.
The FUTURES Act has spurred widespread disapproval and attempts from a few representatives — including AIPAC target Massie — to shoot it down. It draws horror from US veterans, who know no parallel. “I can’t think of another example of Congress formalizing integration of critical national security technologies with a foreign power,” retired Air Force Lt. Col. William Astore told The Intercept.
When Trump wanted to merge US and Russian cybertechnology in 2017, the move was met with disgust by Congress, including Republicans like Marco Rubio, who is now in Trump’s cabinet. It was rightfully seen as a national security threat and rejected. But when Israel wants a more dangerous merger, most of Congress abides.
The uniparty dismisses defenders of US sovereignty as the fringes: leftist Democrats and a few retiring Republicans. They are not the fringes: they are the protectors. They are the only US officials honoring US independence on Independence Day.
The rest are collaborators.
* * *
Before she was ousted by far-right GOP Zionists disguising themselves as a group called “Progressives for Missouri”, my Congresswoman, Cori Bush, honored a friend of mine on the House floor. My friend’s name was Bassem Masri and he was a Ferguson protester. He died in 2018 at age 31.
“As a St. Louis Palestinian, Bassem was ready to resist, to rebel, to rise up with us as we demanded an end to the militarized police occupation of our communities,” Bush said in 2021. “Palestinians know what state violence, militarized policing, and occupation of their communities look like.”
Bush spoke as Israel carried out another massacre of Palestinian civilians. I was touched by her tribute. Famed for his fiery denunciations of police brutality, Bassem was in private a friendly, kind-hearted soul. He knew the violence of the US and Israel and sincerely wanted both to stop. Many Palestinians gave St. Louisans advice on how to treat tear gas and dodge surveillance in 2014. Bassem helped build that bridge.
The uniparty has been trying to stop friendship between Palestinians and Americans, particularly Black Americans, since 2014. But the bond has only deepened as Israel’s war crimes worsen, Trump’s domestic abuses grow, and the Democrats abet both. The US-Israel FUTURES Act is meant to formalize a joint assault on the friendship of free-thinking peoples: one that hostile takeovers of social media failed to eradicate.
“With great power comes great responsibility,” the saying goes. The US is surrendering its great power status. On one hand, we are too criminal to deserve it. On the other, what we are entering into with Israel is far worse.
Sovereignty means a country can try to change. You make your own choices and are responsible for your own sins and, if you’re doing it right, you learn to recognize them as such. Sovereignty is not only what Americans fought for in 1776 but is vital to every civil rights battle that seeks to turn paper principles into practice; and to every anti-war movement demanding an end to this era of unaccountable imperialism.
I’m not lighting fireworks this Fourth of July. I’ll light candles: for Palestine’s slain children, Iran’s slain children, America’s slain children. I’ll light candles for the world no one deserved.
* * *
Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.