By Lola Renegade | September 24, 2025
“Make America Great Again” is not a mere slogan. It is an ancestral curse and love song to racism, a requiem to hate, a demon spirit disguised as patriotism, shouted by the faithful of racism, bankrolled by millionaires and billionaires, paraded by politicians, and stitched into the very skin of those who cannot imagine a world where whiteness does not reign supreme. It is a sales pitch—proof that in America, hate is not merely ideology, it is merchandise. It is a brand stamped on cheap red hats and t-shirts made in China, a bumper-sticker lie sold to the willfully ignorant, and the hateful alike.
But strip away the slogans and the pageantry, and the truth is unavoidable: America will never be great. It has entertained moments of unsustainable greatness. It was never designed to be fully great. Racists and misogynists will make certain it never will be.
Even before the moment America declared independence, it strangled its own promise. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison names are etched in marble, their faces carved into mountains. But their hands were never clean. They owned men, women, and children as property. Jefferson could pen the words “all men are created equal” with one hand while raping Sally Hemings with the other, keeping her and the children born of his rape enslaved. Washington could lead a revolution for liberty and then unleash dogs and bounty hunters to drag back those who sought their own freedom. Yet, he was marketed as never telling a lie. All of them were mythologized into saints and branded as paragons of virtue.
Twelve U.S. presidents owned slaves at some point in their lives, with eight of them being slave owners while in office. Some had children by their enslaves and became the first absentee “fathers” of Black children.
The idea of America’s exceptionalism and the phrase “shining city on a hill” was drenched in murders, sweat, blood, and the cries of enslaved Africans. The greatness they preached was always greatness and wealth for the few, built upon the backs of the many. Before slavery’s chains, there was another crime written in rivers of blood: the genocide of Native peoples. The continent’s first nations were starved, massacred, and driven onto barren reservations. Andrew Jackson—the man Donald Trump idolizes—did not merely sign the Indian Removal Act; he enforced it with satanic smiles, watching families stagger down the Trail of Tears. Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, broken treaties, poisoned water. It is today’s caging of “immigrant” families and separating children from their parents.
The list of America’s atrocities is endless. Its landscape has been ruined and littered from its inception until now with racist, narcissistic, power-drunk psychopathic and sociopathic white men, the women who support them, and their colored allies.
This is never any great nation’s destiny. It was the extermination of anyone not like them, waged with rifles in one hand and the Bible in the other, baptized in the counterfeit holiness of patriotic Christianity. The soil beneath our feet is still stolen, crying out with the blood of those who first walked it. And yet, the very thieves who built their empire on genocide and chains dare to demonically sneer, “Go back to your country.” What arrogance! The irony rolls across centuries, and we must never be lulled into silence, never forget the truth written in the earth itself: the trespassers are the ones shouting at others to leave.
Fast-forward to January 6, 2021, when the Confederate flag once again marched proudly into battle—this time through the U.S. Capitol. Donald Trump, the barely literate reality-TV demagogue turned tyrant-in-chief, summoned his followers to overthrow democracy. He told them to fight like hell, and they obeyed. Windows shattered, police were beaten and killed, and elected officials fled for their lives. The Republican Party—the self-proclaimed party of law and order—stood by in silent complicity.
That day did not just globally disgrace America—it unmasked and revealed it. A felon, a twice-impeached president, a self-professed sexual predator, a tax cheat, a fraud who built his empire on lies, bankruptcies, and racism—Donald Trump carried every scandal like badges of honor. And still, racist white America crowned him president not once, but twice. Twice, they chose corruption over character. Twice, they elevated a man who bragged about assaulting women, who caged children, who mocked the disabled, who praised dictators, who desecrated democracy itself.
The insurrection was not an aberration. It was not a crack in the system. It was the system laid bare. The Confederate flag flying through the Capitol was not a symbol of the past—it was the present, a banner of white rage and entitlement, carried by racists who refuse to loosen their grip on power. The mob was not a departure from the American project; it was the American project in its purest form: whiteness armed, enraged, and unwilling to yield.
And now we witness the grotesque theater of the absurd, the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk. Kirk, a man who spewed venom about immigrants, women, and Black people, was gunned down by another white man. Yet his death is being blamed on “the left,” polished into sainthood, marketed as if he were some fallen soldier fighting for freedom. America loves nothing more than to crown its hatemongers with halos once they are gone. A racist in life becomes a “patriot” in death, his ideology sanitized and packaged for sale.
Here’s Kirk, the community college dropout in his own words. Many of his comments were documented by Media Matters for America, a progressive non-profit that tracks conservative (aka racists) media.
On race, he said:
If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 13 July 2023
If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024
If you’re a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States marine?
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 8 December 2022
Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 19 May 2023
If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 3 January 2024
Kirk truly believed that his whiteness alone placed him on the same level as Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—a Harvard University and Harvard Law School graduate—and Michelle Obama, who excelled and graduated from both Princeton University and Harvard Law School. Joy Reid was also a Harvard graduate. Sheila Jackson Lee was a graduate of Yale University and University of Virginia School of Law. In his twisted worldview, their brilliance could only be explained away as “DEI hires,” stealing opportunities that rightfully belonged to mediocre white men like him.
His rise had nothing to do with either education or merit; it was bankrolled by racist millionaires and billionaires eager to underwrite his racism, misogyny, and hate. Strip away their money and his privilege, and Kirk was exposed for what he was—so shallow in intellect that even college freshmen routinely outmatched him in debates. Now the U.S. ( p)Resident felon-in-thief, Donald Trump, squatting at the white house, will posthumously bestow the presidential medal of freedom on Kirk (yes, I am aware some words are not capitalized, both the office and medal are so degraded, elevation is not deserved). Trump also gave another devout racist, Rush Limbaugh, the same medal. Hate speech is lauded as courage, ignorance is achievement, and bigotry is given a standing ovation.
What is America’s true genius? It is not freedom, nor democracy, nor justice. It is advertising. America knows how to brand lies so well that even those poor whites crushed beneath its boot have decided they are better than all people of color. It sells genocide as destiny. It sells slavery as heritage. It sells Trump as a savior. It sells Charlie Kirk as a martyr. It sells racism as conservative. And it sells “greatness” as though it were ever more than a fairy tale written by white supremacists. In a land ruled by lies, hatred is dressed as virtue, and racist traitors are crowned with medals of freedom they never earned.
Greatness requires truth, but America thrives on delusion. Greatness requires justice, but America builds prisons instead and populates them with people of color while white insurrectionists go free. Greatness requires healing, but America only knows how to wound. From plantations to reservations, from lynching trees to prison cells, from drowning and destroying Black thriving cities, from the Oval Office to the riot on the Capitol steps, America has chosen violence as its signature and hypocrisy as its creed.
If you need proof that America prefers its lies monumental, look to Georgia’s Stone Mountain. There, blasted into granite, loom the figures of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson—Confederate traitors carved larger than life. It is not history. It is propaganda. Built during Jim Crow and unveiled during the Civil Rights Movement, Stone Mountain is a permanent sneer, a towering reminder to Black America that white supremacy still writes the story.
And so the monument stands: a mountain of lies, visible from miles away, impossible to ignore. America carries that mountain on its back every day, dragging it forward, whistling the song, Dixie, while insisting it is free.
“I wish I was in the land of cotton,
Old times they are not forgotten;
Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land.”
Until this wretched country tears down not only the stone but the systems of structural racism it symbolizes, America will remain what it has always been—powerful, yes. Ruthless, yes. But great? Nah. Never.
