This Fourth of July, while Americans fire up grills and wave flags, few stop to ask whether the freedoms we’re celebrating still exist—or ever truly did.
This editorial ran in the 1 July 2025 edition of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.
Every Fourth of July, we honor the day our forefathers signed the Declaration of Independence. We remember the courage it took to defy the world’s most powerful empire, and lay down new principles on parchment: liberty, limited government, and the right to live free from tyranny. It was a bold rebellion of scrappy tobacco colonists against centralized control.
But 249 years later, what exactly are we still celebrating?
We wave flags and light fireworks to honor a revolution against taxation without representation—meanwhile, we labor under a tax code so bloated and byzantine it requires armies of accountants. The American colonists revolted over import taxes that totaled just 1–2% of their income, mainly on tea, paper, and other everyday goods.
They understood the issue wasn’t about money, but authority. Parliament claimed the right to rule them without consent, and the Crown went along—treating liberty as a privilege, not a right given by God.
Today, federal, state, and local governments take nearly 30% of our income (thank you, Latah County, City of Moscow, and the Moscow School District, for making sure we’re paying even more than that). That doesn’t include inflation, licensing fees, red tape, or the debt we’re quietly passing to our kids.
We don’t tar and feather IRS agents—we just hope our deductions survive audit. The colonists went to war over taxes that wouldn’t cover a month of cellphone service. We, somehow, call this freedom.
As is often attributed to Scottish historian Alexander Tytler: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasury.” Judging by the $105 trillion we owe—and the endless stream of handouts—we figured that out a long time ago.
And while we sink under the weight of that debt, we’re ruled by an unelected bureaucratic class that writes half the laws we live under and answers to no one.
We remember a revolt against warrantless searches, yet today our digital lives are tracked, scraped, and surveilled by agencies we never voted for and can’t name. The NSA’s domestic spying—exposed by Edward Snowden—showed how far the government will go to monitor its own citizens. We toast freedom while the state censors dissent and jails those who expose its crimes. That’s not liberty. That’s regime theater.
And both parties helped build it. Under Obama, the surveillance state metastasized into something the British Crown couldn’t have imagined. Under Biden, the federal government colluded with Big Tech to police speech and suppress dissent. Under Trump, emergency powers and executive orders have become the new normal.
The media, once trusted to challenge power, now acts like a Democrat-funded PR firm—running cover—spinning, omitting, and outright lying whenever the truth threatens Democratic power. From calling Hunter Biden’s laptop “Russian disinformation” to cheerleading unconstitutional COVID mandates, they didn’t just fail—they colluded. If you’re wondering why public trust in the media is circling the drain, look no further.
Even the idea of “consent of the governed” rings hollow. Our elections are swayed by billionaires, censored by tech companies, and warped by administrative interference. Non-citizens vote. The census counts every one of them to inflate House seats for states that flout immigration law.
Candidates aren’t chosen—they’re curated by party machines and donors. Remember Hillary’s superdelegates? Or Kamala skipping the primaries entirely? Her $1.2 billion war chest didn’t come from bake sales.
This managed democracy, with just enough ritual to keep us docile, is not at all what the Founders fought for.
So this year, before you fire up the grill or head to the parade, take a moment to confirm exactly what you’re celebrating. It’s not the fireworks. It’s not the flags. It’s the defiance—the conviction that our rights come from the Triune God of the Bible, not government. Liberty isn’t granted by politicians but endowed by our Creator. And when men in power try to strip those rights away, it’s not just our duty to resist—it’s our heritage.
We’ve drifted far from that spirit. We are not as free as we pretend; taxed without transparency, surveilled without consent, regulated without recourse, and governed without real representation.
The way back begins with honesty. If we still care about liberty—real liberty, not slogans and ceremony—we must stop treating the Fourth of July like a nostalgic photo-op and start treating it like what it truly is: a call not just to vigilance, but to courage—to speak truth, defend liberty, and resist those who treat our God-given rights as negotiable.