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voter suppression
In Independence Eve Speech, Trump Warns of Communism Then Promotes One-Party Rule
"If we terminate the filibuster as we should do and immediately vote for the SAVE America Act then we will not lose an election for a hundred years," the president said.
Jul 04, 2026
President Donald Trump spent his address to the United States the night before its 250th birthday fearmongering about the "communist menace" and suggesting that his Republican Party should govern the nation for a century.
"America will never be a communist country," he said from Mount Rushmore, South Dakota Friday night. "We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms, if we are foolish, stupid, and unwise. But if we terminate the filibuster as we should do and immediately vote for the SAVE America Act then we will not lose an election for a hundred years."
His remarks clearly implied a false link between communism and the Democratic Party and promoted a bill that critics say will make it harder for millions of eligible voters to participate in elections. The SAVE America Act claims to address the documented non-problem of noncitizen voting by requiring voters to show documents such as passports and birth certificates, which can be expensive and difficult to obtain, especially for low-income voters. Such requirements would also impose added burdens on rural voters and married women who have changed their names.
Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, wrote on social media that with his remarks, Trump was "clearly defining the effects of voter suppression bills."
Trump clearly defining the effects of voter suppression bills. https://t.co/vKOytLxdm0
— Melanie D'Arrigo (@DarrigoMelanie) July 4, 2026
"What message could be more unifying on the nation’s 250th birthday weekend than touting one-party rule?" writer Michael Freeman posted on social media.
California state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-11) wrote: "The thing about Trump is he tells us what he wants & what he intends to do. He wants to end democracy. Freeze MAGA in power forever. Have zero accountability to the people. Just seize power & keep it. We are so close to true authoritarianism. We must use every ounce of power & leverage we have to stop them."
Before arguing for 100 years of Republican rule, Trump continued the exaggerated anti-communist rhetoric he has employed in the weeks since progressive and Democratic-Socialist candidates won a series of Democratic primary victories.
"There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success," Trump said on Friday. "These are not mere political disagreements like differences over taxes or regulations. Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11."
In fact, the Democratic Socialists who won primary elections in New York City last month ran on a platform of affordable housing, Medicare for All, stronger unions, and an end to US military support for Israel's genocide in Gaza, policies backed by large numbers of ordinary Americans.
Trump doubled down on an opposition between communism and US values and also linked his anti-communist to his anti-immigrant stance, threatening to send communists into "exile."
"You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both," Trump said in a quote later posted from the White House X account.
Apparently, you can be a rapist and an alleged pedophile and become President. https://t.co/aYAMCJQOPO
— Wajahat Ali (@WajahatAli) July 4, 2026
"This July 4th, the Trump regime is pushing a new Red Scare. This is an actual White House post. The regime is pretending that communism is a serious threat to America," Tom Joscelyn, who served as a senior professional staffer on the January 6 Committee, responded on social media.
MeidasNews editor in chief Ron Filipkowski argued that Trump was leaning on anti-communism to divert attention from his own disastrous policies.
"Trump fucks up the economy with his tariffs, raises gas prices for every American with his foolish war, piles on to the national debt with his budget & wasteful spending on vanity projects, covers up Epstein, makes billions for himself, then starts yelling about communism to distract," he wrote on social media.
Journalist Mark Chadbourn agreed, writing on social media that the speech reflected Trump's "new strategy."
"Now he’s failed completely abroad, he’s looking to the Enemy Within to create new Hate Figures to unite his wavering followers," Chadbourn said. "Can’t stop Iran’s threat so let’s have a 2026 Red Scare to turn neighbour against neighbour. A new HUAC on the way? Very dangerous."
Trump's July 3 remarks contrasted with those of New York Democratic Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani earlier that day, who uplifted the country's immigrant heritage, decried greed and racial supremacy, and argued that “time and again, including 250 years ago, those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress.”
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Happy 250th Birthday, American Democracy—You're Under Attack!
The lesson of 250 years: Democracy is hard won and may be easily lost unless we are vigilant in protecting it.
Jul 04, 2026
This Fourth of July marks the 250th birthday of a new kind of nation state — based not on ancestral ties to a land or on the territorial reach of monarchs, but on shared principles about the rights of citizens and the purpose of the state.
The Founding Fathers set forth those principles in the Declaration of Independence: “All men are created equal” and have “unalienable Rights [to] Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” To “secure these rights,” Jefferson wrote, the government must “derive just powers from the consent of the governed.”
America has come a long way over two and a half centuries, but today we face a grave challenge from within — and especially from our own leaders.
Of course, those founding ideas have always been more aspiration than reality. In a sense the Declaration of Independence was an invitation to struggle over the inequalities that marred the new nation: slavery and white supremacy, the subjugation of Native peoples, the legal subordination of women, the limitation of voting rights to the well-off.
In the course of 250 years, those struggles have achieved tremendous progress.
A bloody Civil War won what Lincoln called “a new birth of freedom.” Slavery was abolished and the Constitution amended to strengthen the government’s ability to safeguard the rights of African Americans and other people.
Women were eventually enfranchised and achieved formal legal equality. The lawless subordination and genocides of Native Americans were eventually recognized as the evils they are. The Civil Rights Movement repealed American apartheid and restored rights that had been stripped away.
But equality and democracy are openly contested today in a manner not seen in a century. Those who oppose the Founding Fathers’ fundamental values are using our government to attack equality and democracy. The good news is that tens of millions of Americans are fighting back.
America is and always has been a nation of diverse peoples — a multi-ethnic, multi-racial mix — and that is what the Framers and their successors had in mind.
Indeed, the Declaration of Independence complained that the King obstructed the “Naturalization of Foreigners” and failed to “encourage migration hither.” Enslavers brought millions of Africans to our shores, and America became their land as well. National expansion westward incorporated French, Spanish, and Mexican peoples into America, too.
But today the Trump regime seeks to erase the diversity essential to our national character. White supremacy and white nationalism are threads running through nearly every policy — from ending civil rights enforcement to discriminating against African-American military leaders, terminating refugee programs for nonwhites, slandering Haitians, and calling Hispanic migrants “the worst of the worst.”
Free elections, majority rule, and democracy itself are Trump’s targets — from his efforts to overturn the 2020 election to his unrelenting assault on voting rights and representation today.
Today, gerrymanders demanded by Trump are likely to eliminate one third of African-American members of Congress. The Supreme Court has erased the protections of the Voting Rights Act. Evidence-free voter suppression laws are making it more difficult for eligible voters to cast their ballots, while Trump seeks to outlaw voting by mail and his backers threaten to deploy ICE to intimidate midterm voters.
On this 250th anniversary of our first struggle for American freedom and democracy, Americans are fighting back against this war on what makes America America — in the voting booth, in the courts, in the streets, and in our hearts.
The lesson of 250 years: Democracy is hard won and may be easily lost unless we are vigilant in protecting it. The vision of our Founding Fathers depends on you, me, and all of us to safeguard it.
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'Feels Very 1984': ICE Agents Push Poll Worker to Delete Post Calling for Charges Against Renee Good Killer
"ICE agents entered a polling place to intimidate a worker about her social media posts," said a civil liberties advocate.
Jun 25, 2026
A poll worker in Syracuse, New York said she was left unsettled after a pair of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents showed up at her polling place to tell her to delete Instagram content calling for the indictment of the agent who shot Renee Good in January.
The worker, Paigelynne Gonyea, was in the middle of her shift during Tuesday's elections in New York when she received a phone message from someone who identified himself as Dave Brody, a special agent with the Department of Homeland Security.
He said agents "were just by" her apartment and had spoken to her husband about a post in which she "doxxed an ICE agent back in January."
Gonyea said the agents were referring to a post she made on January 8, 2026, the day after an ICE agent shot and killed Good, a 37-year-old mother and US citizen, in Minneapolis. The post contained an image of the masked agent, who had at that point been identified as Jonathan Ross by the Minnesota Star Tribune.
"The ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good in broad daylight has been identified as Jonathan Ross by the Minnesota Star Tribune," the post read. "I think today is a great day for Jonathan to be indicted!"
Gonyea said she could not leave her job working the polls to speak with the agents, so she told them to come to her polling place. "They knew I was a poll site worker and still came in," she said.
Referencing what happened to Good, she said she refused to meet with the agents outside alone.
“I’ve seen the news, especially in Minnesota,” she said. “And I didn’t want anything to happen to me at all.”
Video of the encounter, shot by another employee, shows the two agents entering the polling site at Central Library on Salina Street.
The agents handed Gonyea a form letter that read, "YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW."
The form, which Gonyea posted, said ICE's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) had identified a post on Gonyea's account that it believed "may constitute a violation" of federal law.
The notice informed her that "it is unlawful to threaten to assault, kidnap, and/or murder a federal official" and that "knowingly making restricted personal information about a covered person, or their immediate family member, publicly available with the intent to threaten, intimidate, or incite the commission of a crime" was also illegal. It said violating these laws could subject her to state and federal prosecution.
The letter directed her to "promptly remove and/or discontinue the aforementioned behavior." It warned her that receipt of the notice "will be taken into consideration, should you continue to be involved in any criminal activities described above."
Gonyea told Syracuse.com that the agents presented her with copies of her social media posts and her driver's license and that "they tried to scare me into signing" the document "while I was working."
She refused to sign the notice despite continued pressure from the agents.
Gonyea was emphatic that her post—which only repeated publicly reported information—did not violate the law.
“I didn’t dox his personal information, such as address, phone number,” she said, adding that she would not remove the post.
Gonyea has discussed the case with the New York Board of Elections and the attorney general’s civil rights office, and she said she has contacted US Rep. John Mannion (D-NY), Syracuse Mayor Sharon Owens, and the New York Civil Liberties Union.
She has created a GoFundMe page to pay for potential legal expenses.
“For ICE to come to me over a social media post just feels very 1984 to me,” Gonyea said. “They definitely should have known better to not go into a polling place, even if I said it was OK.”
In a post on her GoFundMe page, Gonyea described the incident as a "pretty unsettling run-in."
"It’s the kind of situation that makes you stop and think about free speech and how far government authority can go. Honestly, it shook me, and I don’t think it’s something that should just be brushed off," she said. "It just doesn’t sit right with me."
Dustin Czarny, the election commissioner for Onondaga County, emphasized that federal law only allows specific people to enter polling places during elections—including poll workers, elections inspectors, voters eligible to vote at the site, and someone a voter brought to assist them in voting
Federal law specifies that it is unlawful for anyone in federal service to send “troops or armed men” to places where elections are held.
“There’s no role for law enforcement officials to be inside a polling place unless they are responding to an emergency of some kind,” Czarny said. “There is no indication of that here.”
Despite this, Trump administration officials have indicated a desire to send ICE agents to polling places on election day during the 2026 midterms.
Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in February that her department had been "proactive to make sure we have the right people voting" in elections. In March, then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche asked at a conservative political conference, "Why is there objection to sending ICE officers to polling places?” adding, "Illegals can't vote. It doesn't make any sense."
Trump refused to rule out the possibility when asked about it by reporters in May, saying he'd "do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections."
Critics of ICE have described agents' demands for Gonyea to remove political speech as a worrying new frontier for the agency's encroachments on civil liberties.
"ICE agents entered a polling place to intimidate a worker about her social media posts," said David J. Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. "Wouldn't you quit before you carried out an order to do this?"
"Americans refuse to be intimidated by these government criminals who hate the Constitution," he added. "Normal people want accountability, not impunity for killing Americans unnecessarily."
"But it’s not enough for ICE to disagree; they need to stamp out dissent," he said. "I know they monitor my social media. You should know that they’re monitoring yours too."
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