Thank you all for coming out on this beautiful 4th of July morning to support those of us who wish to exercise our 1st Amendment rights to free speech on this day, our 250th celebration of our national birthday.
For decades we've been told to fear a secret government, a shadowy network of bureaucrats hiding in Washington, D.C., quietly working against the will of the people, popularized by TV shows like The X Files, that suggested a star chamber existed within the government.
Today, I want to show you where the real threat lies, and it isn't hidden at all.
You all know the term "Deep State." Popularized by Trump and his minions, it conjures images of unelected bureaucrats manipulating and pulling the levers of power that no one can see.
That was the story.
But look at what's actually happened in this country over the last decade, and a different picture comes into focus.
The most entrenched, most permanent power structure in American life today isn't hiding in a federal office building. It's sitting in plain sight, in statehouses, in school boards, in pulpits, and in broadcast studios across rural America and the southern states.
The original idea of a "Deep State" was about entrenchment: power so embedded in a system that it survives no matter who wins an election.
Ironically, that description fits the MAGA movement far better than it ever fit a civil servant.
Look at deep red states. Gerrymandered legislatures. Partisan school boards. Courts stacked to one ideology. Media that amplifies a single worldview, year after year, election after election.
None of this is hidden.
It doesn't have to be. It's not a conspiracy – it's a culture. A web of local power, community loyalty, and identity so dense that it doesn't just survive a changing political climate. It defines it.
Take our good neighbor Texas, for example. Republicans have gerrymandered the state so much that they've guaranteed continuous rule for over 20 years, eliminating majority-Black and Hispanic districts, placing the Bible in public schools. Mandating that kids learn Bible verses? And making self-determination of one's own body a crime!
Leaders rise. Leaders fall. But the political infrastructure stays.
State legislatures. Media networks. Religious institutions. Advocacy groups built to outlast any single candidate.
This system doesn't need secrecy. It rules through something more durable than secrecy, it rules through cultural hegemony. It writes the school curriculum. It restricts who can vote. It regulates what happens to peoples' own bodies.
And when the national political winds shift, when an election doesn't go their way, the order in these communities barely moves.
That's not an accident. That's by design.
Think about this: Power in America today isn't just institutional. It's a state of mind.
It lives in closed information loops, in moral absolutism, and in the myth that "real America" is under siege and must defend itself from the rest of us.
So let's be precise about what we're dealing with here.
The "Deep State", not a secret government, it's Red America!
It's a culture of hate!
A self-perpetuating system of beliefs embedded in Christian Nationalism and White Nationalism, that decides who belongs, who's legitimate, and who gets to be heard.
I'm here to call it out for what it is. It's called FASCISM!
It represents the worst of us, not the best, and it is deeply un-American.
So here's the irony: the same rhetoric once used to accuse bureaucrats of subverting democracy now perfectly describes a movement that has institutionalized itself as a permanent, counter-democratic force.
The real deep state was never in Washington's hallways. It's in the cultural bedrock of states and communities that have built their own parallel version of truth, governance, and power, that demands that the rest of us call it normal?
Once we see that clearly, the challenge in front of us changes.
Because the threats to democracy we should fear most aren't secret. They're not hidden in a basement or a classified file.
They're visible. They're organized. They've been building for years, right out in the open.
The work now isn't to expose a hidden conspiracy. It's to look directly at what's already standing in plain sight, and to decide that we're not going to look away. We see it for what it is, and we're not going to take it sitting down.
