Terror Wearing a Badge: Lady Liberty Watches

Anti-war veterans barricaded inside the Statue of Liberty in New York fly an American flag in the upside down position from the crown of the statue, Dec. 27, 1971. (AP Photo/Tony Camerano)

I am watching you now, and I need you to understand what that means. I have been standing in this harbor for one hundred and forty years, and I have never once looked away from what this country was doing or becoming. What I am watching now is the deliberate, systematic, and gleeful destruction of everything I was built to represent, everything that was promised in the words carved at my feet, everything that made the rest of the world look toward this harbor with something other than pity.

I see the families being torn apart, not by poverty or illness or the ordinary cruelties of an imperfect world, but by the deliberate policy of a regime that has weaponized the federal government against the very people I was built to welcome and protect. IÇE and ÇBP agents in tactical gear and masks, refusing to show identification, descend on neighborhoods, workplaces, and homes in the early morning hours. They are not enforcing the law so much as they are performing the erasure of human beings. The people being erased are not criminals so much as they are inconveniences, and the difference between those two things is the difference between justice and terror. What is happening in this country right now is terror wearing a badge.

You cannot make things perfect for people, but you do not have to make it difficult. And they chose difficult. They chose it deliberately, with intention, with pleasure, and with the full knowledge of who would suffer most.

I see the children, and I need you to sit with that for a moment. A hit dog will holler, and the Republicunts who built these policies have hollered loudly about their love of family and their love of life and their love of country. They call themselves pro-life. They have built entire political careers on that word, raised billions of dollars on that word, won elections on that word, and appointed Supreme Court justices on that word. But pro-life does not mean what they say it means, because the children I am watching right now are alive, they are breathing, they are crying, they are real, and they are being separated from their parents and placed in facilities that no person who actually loved life would ever allow to exist. Families have been shattered across international borders with no process, no hearing, no counsel, and no mercy. Mercy requires seeing the humanity of the person in front of you, and the regime has decided that certain people do not qualify as fully human. Pro-life, it turns out, only applies to the lives they find convenient, and that is not a moral position. That is a lie wearing the costume of one.

I remember what it felt like when they were building me, when France gave me to this country as a gift between democracies, as a symbol of what free people could build together when they chose to believe in something larger than their own fear. I remember the ships that came into this harbor carrying people who had survived things that most Americans today cannot imagine. They were fleeing pogroms, which is the word for when a government organizes a community to slaughter its neighbors based on nothing more than who they are (sound familiar?), and they were fleeing famine and war and persecution. They had nothing but the clothes on their bodies and the hope in their hearts that this country meant what it said about freedom. I welcomed every single one of them, because that is what I was built to do, because that is what America was supposed to be. I am watching that promise be burned to the ground by the very people who claim to love this country most, the 'America First' Republicunts.

I see what has been done to the right to vote, and I need you to understand what that means in full. When the Supreme Court's six conservative justices dismantled the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, they did not simply change a law. They reached back through sixty years of blood and sacrifice and marching and dying and dragged this country backward past 1965, past the Edmund Pettus Bridge, past the fire hoses and the police dogs and the church bombings, past every moment of moral clarity this country has ever managed to achieve on the question of who deserves to participate in their own democracy. They did it with the full knowledge that the maps being drawn in Tennessee, Florida, Louisiana, and Alabama in the hours and days after that ruling were designed to erase Black political representation from the map of this country. That is not a policy disagreement but a continuation of the oldest and most persistent crime in American history: white supremacy.

I see the prisons, and you would be wise to follow the money. The for-profit prison industry in this country is not a justice system so much as it is a slavery system wearing the costume of justice. The Thirteenth Amendment's exception for those convicted of a crime has been used since the moment it was ratified to ensure that the emancipation of Black Americans would be incomplete, conditional, and reversible. The regime's mass detention of immigrants, asylum seekers, and anyone who could not produce the correct documents fast enough has flooded those prisons with human beings who are being forced to work for pennies while private corporations collect government contracts worth billions. If you cannot see the line between that and the plantation then you are not looking, and if you are not looking then the only question worth asking is why you have chosen not to.

The powerful are killing the powerless. The rich are killing the poor. And the people who voted for this are watching it happen from a comfortable distance, calling it necessary.

I see the bombs falling, and I need you to understand what America has become in the eyes of the world. †rump's regime has bombed Iran and Venezuela and is positioning itself for conflict with Cuba. It has threatened, bullied, and economically attacked Canada and Mexico and Greenland, treating sovereign nations and democratic allies as if they were properties to be acquired or enemies to be punished. The world that once looked at this harbor with admiration is now looking at this country with a combination of horror and pity and carefully managed distance. The allies that this country spent eighty years building, through two World Wars and a Cold War and every international crisis in between, are recalibrating their relationships with a nation that has chosen to be governed by a man who admires dictators and attacks democracies. America is now standing in the world the way a person stands after they have burned every bridge they ever had, which is to say alone, which is to say cold, which is to say exactly the way the people who voted for this should feel when they go to sleep at night.

I see what has been done to the free press, to the scientists, to the teachers, to the doctors, to the civil servants who spent their careers trying to make this government function for ordinary people. The regime has defunded NPR and PBS and ended Voice of America and pulled press credentials from journalists who refused to use its preferred geography. It has sicced the FÇÇ on broadcast networks that covered it critically, and fired scientists at the EPA and the CDC and the NIH, and ended the collection of data that the country depends on to understand what is happening to the health and safety and environment of its own people. A regime that cannot be seen cannot be held accountable. A people that cannot see clearly cannot resist effectively. The deliberate blinding of the American public is not a side effect of this regime. It is one of its earliest and most primary goals.

I see what Prøject 2025 is, because I have read all nine hundred and twenty pages of it, because I have been standing here long enough to recognize a blueprint for the end of self-governance when I see one. The Heritage Føundåtiøn and the Republicunts who wrote it did not hide what they intended. They published it. They distributed it. They staffed the regime with the people who wrote it, and they have been executing it one action per day since January 20, 2025. More than half of it has already been implemented, and the other half is waiting for the political conditions to make it possible. The word for what is happening is not reform, and it is not policy, and it is not even politics. The word for what is happening is the end. They voted with the full intention of ending the democratic experiment that this country has spent two hundred and fifty years trying to perfect, and the people who did it either knew exactly what they were choosing and did not care, or did not know because they chose not to look, and I am not sure which of those is worse.

I have held this torch for one hundred and forty years. I have never once let it go out, and I am telling you now that the people who are trying to extinguish it are not patriots. They are arsonists wearing flags.

I see the damage that cannot be undone. I see the people who died in IÇE custody and at the border and in hospitals that were no longer required to treat them. And I need to say something about that word again, the word they love so much, the word pro-life, because there are people in this country right now who do not know where their family members are. They were taken. They were loaded into vehicles, planes, or buses, and they disappeared into a system that does not answer questions, does not return calls, and does not produce bodies when asked where the bodies are. Some of them have been beaten. Some of them have been raped. Some of them are dead in places their families will never find them. And the people who call themselves pro-life have not said a single word about any of them, which tells you everything you will ever need to know about what pro-life has always actually meant. I see the families scattered across borders who will never be whole again. I see the scientists whose research was deleted, whose careers were ended, and whose findings on climate, disease, and public health will take a generation to reconstruct, if they are ever reconstructed at all. I see the voters whose districts were redrawn in the night so that their voices would never again determine the outcome of an election. I see the children who grew up in this country and were deported to countries they have never known. I see the transgender Americans who were classified as national security threats by their own government. I see the workers who lost their right to organize, their right to overtime, their right to food assistance, and their right to healthcare. I see the planet given over to the fossil fuel industry with the full knowledge that the damage being done to it is permanent. The weight of all of that is not something I can carry alone, and it is not something the people who caused it get to walk away from.

I remember what America was becoming before January 20, 2025. It was not perfect. It was never perfect. Nothing built by human beings is ever perfect. But it was becoming more itself, more open, more honest about its history, more willing to reckon with what it had done and try to do better, more willing to extend the promise of democracy to the people it had historically excluded from that promise. All of that becoming, all of that imperfect, painful, and honest striving toward something better, has been deliberately reversed by people who were threatened by progress, who confused the expansion of freedom with the loss of power, who decided that a country where everyone was equal was a country where they were less. They chose, when given the choice between a larger democracy and a smaller one that protected their dominance, to make the country smaller. They will live inside that smallness for the rest of their lives, and so will everyone else. That is the true cost of what they have done.

There is no version of this in which they are welcome in what comes next. There is no reconciliation being offered here. There is no hand being extended across the divide they built, widened, defended, and celebrated.

I am the Statue of Liberty, and I have stood in this harbor since 1886. I have watched this country be born, grow, stumble, rise, fail, and try again, and I have held my torch through all of it, because the torch is not a symbol of perfection. It is a symbol of the attempt, of the willingness to keep trying to be better than what you were. The people who voted for †rump did not just vote against the attempt. They voted to end it. They voted to hand this country over to the people who were most afraid of what it was becoming. The damage they have done is not the kind that gets repaired in a single election or a single generation. They do not get to stand in the light of the torch they tried to extinguish and call themselves patriots. They do not get to claim membership in the America that the rest of us are going to have to rebuild from the wreckage of what they chose. They do not get absolution. They do not get comfort. They do not get welcome, because welcome is something that is extended to people who recognize the humanity of others, and they have demonstrated, in every policy, every vote, every silence, and every cheer, that they do not.

We are not the same. We have never been the same. When this is over, they will know that too, because the people who survive what is being done to this country will remember exactly who stood by and watched it happen and called it freedom. History will record their names. The torch will still be burning. And they will not be welcome anywhere near it.

They wanted 'America First,' and they got it. America is first in nothing now except isolation, first in nothing except the cold silence of allies who no longer call, first in nothing except the particular loneliness of a nation that burned every bridge it ever had and then stood in the ashes and called it strength. That is what they voted for. That is what they built. And they will live inside it the way this country now lives inside it, which is to say alone, which is to say cold, which is to say without the warmth of a single hand extended in friendship from the world they chose to abandon. They brought it upon themselves. Every last bit of it. And they will remain there, in that alone, for as long as history remembers what they chose, which is to say forever.

I have watched you. I will not forget what I have seen. And neither will they.