Trump hijacked US’s 250 anniversary to serve ‘political ideology and pet projects’, congressional report says

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/02/trump-hijacked-250-anniversary?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Collage featuring fireworks, a close-up of Donald Trump's face, a UFC event at the White House, a cowboy riding a horse, and airplanes flying over the White House Illustration: Guardian Design

House Democratic subcommittee report outlines web of alleged corruption, wire fraud and pay-to-play schemes

The interim report, “From Vanity to Insanity: How the White House Cheated the American People Out of Their 250th Birthday”, outlines a web of alleged corruption, wire fraud and pay-to-play schemes orchestrated through a shadow corporation embedded within the National Park Foundation (NPF).

The document was produced by Democratic staff of the House of Representatives’ natural resources committee’s oversight and investigations subcommittee. It has not been officially adopted by the committee.


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‘A sanitized view of America’: inside Trump’s campaign to erase US history from national parks
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“Under President Donald Trump, this anniversary has been hijacked and perverted into a hotbed of corruption and self-enrichment,” it states, contending that the machinery built for a national commemoration was converted “into an apparatus for raising and spending money in service of the President’s ego, political ideology, and pet projects”.
How Trump is making the US’s 250th anniversary about himself – video

In 2016 Congress established the US semiquincentennial commission, operating as the non-profit America250 Foundation, to plan the nation’s 2026 celebrations on a non-partisan basis. However, under Trump, the White House launched a sustained pressure campaign to subsume the commission.

When America250 leadership resisted its demands to shift focus toward partisan, campaign-style spectacles, the Trump administration created Freedom 250 as a wholly owned subsidiary of the congressionally chartered NPF.

The interim report finds that, by taking control of the NPF board and installing key campaign operatives such as Meredith O’Rourke and Chris LaCivita, the White House secured an opaque vehicle that enjoyed the NPF’s non-partisan credibility and tax-exempt status while operating outside standard government transparency laws.

Jared Huffman, a California congressman who is the top Democrat on the natural resources committee, said: “I can’t, in my time here in Congress, remember anything even remotely like this: watching this trusted, venerable charity organisation, the National Parks Foundation, literally be hijacked for a craven political agenda that tries to steal the celebration of America’s 250th anniversary and turn it into something that’s all about Trump, advancing this very divisive agenda and even enriching Trump and those around him.”

The interim report alleges that Freedom 250 surreptitiously diverted resources intended for America250 for its own benefit, leaving America250 scrambling for funds.

Sources interviewed by Democrats on the committee said fundraisers including O’Rourke misled prospective America250 donors by providing them with Freedom 250’s banking and routing numbers instead. The report finds this could constitute wire fraud and charitable solicitation fraud under federal and District of Columbia law.

This deceit extended to the entertainment industry. Artists recruited for the kickoff of the Great American State Fair – including Martina McBride and Young MC – were assured the event was non-partisan, only to face social media backlash when the event was revealed to be a Trump-backed rally. In the words of Young MC, the booking was a “bait and switch”.

The investigation also outlines how Freedom 250 effectively put a price tag on presidential access, circulating sponsorship packages starting at $500,000 and climbing above $10m for tiered recognition, culminating in a “historic photo opportunity” with Trump.

The report also points to perhaps the most clear example on 14 June when the White House hosted a huge Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event on the South Lawn to celebrate the president’s 80th birthday. The event was heavily sponsored by corporations facing impending federal regulation and used vast government resources for “Super Bowl-level security” marshalled by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Fighters received bonuses in “USD1”, a cryptocurrency issued by World Liberty Financial, a trust run by the president’s children, and Trump personally bought up to $50,000 in stock in the UFC’s parent company weeks before the event.

Freedom 250 has also functioned as a conduit for steering federal funds to Trump campaign loyalists. Event Strategies – the same firm that planned the January 6 rally that preceded the US Capitol attack – was awarded 18 federal contracts totalling roughly $40m, along with an indefinite delivery master contract worth up to $100m.

Beyond lucrative contracts, the administration is accused of building a partisan political database disguised as a government domain. Freedom 250’s website, initially managed by former “Department of Government Efficiency” (Doge) employees known for past data leaks, extensively logs user data.

Event registration is powered by Campaign Nucleus, a firm founded by Brad Parscale, a veteran of Trump election campaigns. Campaign Nucleus openly boasts about using artificial intelligence to analyse personal data and target “persuadable” voters. Unsuspecting visitors, such as attenders of a free Fifa World Cup Fan Zone on the National Mall, unwittingly fed their personal information directly into this Republican campaign apparatus.

The report also focuses on the ideological overhaul of the semiquincentennial. Freedom 250 replaced America250’s civic engagement focus with overt Christian nationalist programming, operating in tandem with the Religious Liberty Commission, which recently recommended repealing the Johnson amendment to allow churches to engage in partisan politics.

A central feature of this effort was “Freedom Trucks” – a federally funded fleet of mobile museums dispatched to schoolchildren across the nation. Supplied with content from the conservative PragerU [the Prager University Foundation] and Hillsdale College, these exhibits recast the founding of the US as an exclusively Christian project, embracing demonstrable falsehoods.

Exhibits include an AI-generated George Washington claiming that “our rights are a gift from God”, a statement the first president is not documented as having made, alongside antisemitic tropes suggesting that Jewish merchants financed the revolutionary cause while omitting they also fought and died for it.

Concurrently, the administration aggressively moved to erase historical realities, removing national park signage detailing slavery, forced removal of Indigenous peoples and climate change. Huffman said it amounted to an attempt to reshape American identity to fit a narrow rightwing agenda.

“It’s a fantasy that airbrushes out the more complicated parts of our history – slavery, the Native American genocide, the actual secular ideals on which our government was founded. It wasn’t the opening of the clouds and some revealed covenant with God as they would have you believe.”

As Washington barrels towards Fourth of July, with another Trump speech and a big fireworks display planned for the national mall, Huffman acknowledges that Freedom 250 is unstoppable. But his goal now is exposure.

“The one thing we can do is make sure the American people know what they’re doing in our name and with our tax dollars,” the congressman said. “We should do that because what they have pulled off here is a potential template for other betrayals of public trust that they and maybe future generations will attempt if we don’t challenge them.”

NO Church Should EVER Be Like THIS

This is a kids summer camp and the kids seen are very young.   The claim is this is an evangelical church in Kentucky doing a mock execution of an illegal immigrant.   The kids are chanting “Take him out and blow him up”.  The screen says praise the lord and pass the ammo.  My question is when did jesus preach hate?  I know the bible does, but Christians are to be followers of Jesus and aside from the money changers event Jesus preached love and acceptance of the stranger.  Bible traditions said to welcome the stranger.  Sodom and Gomorrah is about god being angry the town was not hospitable to the strangers and wanted to dominate them rather than feed / house them.  

I googled when did Jesus preach hate and I got this summary. Jesus did not preach hate; rather, He taught love and forgiveness. In Matthew 5:43-44, He instructs, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” emphasizing the importance of loving others, even those who may oppose us. Below was a list of biblical hate passages including two in John.  Guess what I read the chapters.  The passages were not direct sayings from or attributed to Jesus.   So what god are these “Christians” following?  As to the YouTuber showing this he is not trans, he is a VTuber and uses an avatar his fans make and like.  As all things on the internet it can get weird and he thought that as people kept sending him stuff as a female and a furry he would b=play along with the bit.  I skip the fan art stuff at the beginning as that stuff bores me and it is only a few minutes.   Hugs 


 

This church performed a mock execution in front of CHILDREN at a BIBLE CAMP. And somehow these people are the ones saying that the left is indoctrinating their kids, meanwhile they normalize public executions to children.

Clips from the Majority Report about Zorhan Mamdani and the rise of the DSA

 

 

 

Some The Majority Report Clips on the DSA and reactions to their wins from corporate establishment democrats and republicans.

 

 

 

Redistricting: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

The Real History Behind Anti-Trans Laws

Wow.  There is a lot of historic information in this video.  The author / presenter has quick cuts to other personality characters she plays to highlight the absurdity of some positions held by the hierarchy.  She delvesdeeply into the idea of what is proper femininity, who steps outside it, and who thinks they are responsible for judging or enforcing it.  She delves into how many fights against change and equality are about fears by men of emasculation.  The lowering of men’s status.  When she elaborates on suffrage, all the fears seem to be that allowing women to vote would give women the right to be men and force men to be women.   Seem familure?   She goes into detail on how each repressive opressive responce to equal rights comes down to the same phrases such as save the children, save the family,  or the claims that society it self will end.   The clips she intersperses go by far too quickly so I had to stop the video to read them but she does describe what is on them.   The begining was choppy and it took me a bit to get  her style of presentation but once I did I found it very informative fillwed with facts, history, and fun to watch.  Hugs

The transgender bathroom ‘debate’ isn’t new (but it is stupid). I’m looking at you TERF’s…

Looking back through history, gender politics is consistently entangled with race, class, misogyny, and disability. Minority groups existing outside the ‘norm’ are attacked as ‘radicals’ or menaces to society…

But what prevails each time we face oppression AND causes real change in our society? 

 

 

Buttigieg says his family was target of ‘politically motivated hoax’

This is horrific and I believe I already posted on it once.   Ron and I talked about it at length.  Hug         ————————————————————————————————————————————

Buttigieg says his family was target of ‘politically motivated hoax’

The former transportation secretary described it as “the ugliest thing that has happened to me since my career in service began.”

Pete Buttigieg in shadow.Pete Buttigieg, former secretary of transportation, during the National Action Network 35th Anniversary Convention on April 10, 2026, in New York City.Adam Gray / Bloomberg via Getty Images

WH Doc Declares Church/State Separation Defunct

WH Doc Declares Church/State Separation Defunct

June 26, 2026

The Hill reports:

A draft final report from President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission released on Friday calls for “building bridges between church and state,” a seeming reversal of a longstanding U.S. legal principle. “Americans must know their rights and stand with courage when those rights are challenged,” the commission’s report reads.

“To preserve this freedom, we must build bridges, not walls, between the City of God and the City of Man. If we do so, we will pass on a free and prosperous nation to the next generation,” it continues.

The argument is a stark reversal of the legal principle that calls for the separation of church and state. The phrase “separation of church and state” does not explicitly appear in the Constitution, but the Constitution states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Read the full article.

The commission is chaired by Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who recently declared that James Talarico is going to hell.

Today he said, “From this day forward, the phrase separation of church and state has no power.”

Dan Patrick: "Separation of Church and state is not in the Constitution"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-06-26T19:57:00.090Z

Dan Patrick: "Separation of Church and state is not in the Constitution"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-06-26T19:57:00.090Z

PAULA WHITE: Nobody has stood up like you have stood upTRUMP: *sitting* *asleep*

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-06-26T19:51:58.887Z

just unreal how Trump can't stay keep his eyes open even while on camera in the Oval

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-06-26T19:47:39.537Z

Oh, unfortunately, we think about it every day.A “faith director” in every federal agency isn't a victory for religious liberty. It's an attempt to weave religion into the machinery of government. That's exactly why we have church-state separation.

— (@ffrf.org) 2026-06-26T16:53:24.449Z

Neither is Jesus.The Constitution says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. "Separation of church and state" is the shorthand for that principle, one the Supreme Court has recognized for decades.

— (@ffrf.org) 2026-06-26T20:50:02.465Z

TX Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick: Separation of church and state should have no power over people ever again in America

— FactPost (@factpostnews.bsky.social) 2026-06-26T20:39:20.057Z

BREAKING: Buttigieg and family TARGETED in ‘politically motivated’ HOAX

This is horrific.  I think the police overreacted for just an anonymous tip with sketchy vague accusations.   It put this family through hell.  This is all to stop Buttigieg from entering politics, and if it is given any credit it will only increase.  Hugs

$360,000 and Counting: School Districts Are Spending Big Bucks to Fight Anti-Trans Lawsuits

This is a very important news article.  I hope everyone will read it.  This is scary how a small mostly religious minority wants to erase an entire group of people from existence just for a made up moral certainty that they can’t accept that people different from them exist.   They simply won’t accept that other people can feel differently than they do and they insist that they have the right to deny all rights to LGBTQ+ kids / people.   I remember being a gay teenager hearing these same arguments about people like me in J high school.  How gay kids shouldn’t be allowed in locker rooms as we may get excited by the other kids bodies and lose control and have sex with them right there in the locker room.  It was a huge fight back then about gay teachers as the moral right felt they shouldn’t be teaching kids who might see being gay as normal.  I remember the silly stupid republicans like Sam Nunn claiming no military person wanted to serve with or god forbid shower in the same room as a gay man.  At the time I was gay and in the military and having more sex and great times even with straight guys.  But the parent pushing the claim that their daughter had to change clothes in front of a trans kid went on right wing TV programs to promote the hate.  The school denies that setup existed.  Plus a lot of this is funded and pushed by religious hate groups with a lot of donated money behind them in an attempt to keep the country from progressing as their god is stuck with writings from 2,500 years ago and the majority of hate preachers seem to idolize the 1950s.  I feel so sorry for the trans kids today.  I remember what it was like for me as a gay kid in the public school system.  I was not even out, just different but still I was attacked as a queer faggot.  Why some people hate so deeply and want to act on it and even pass it on to others hopeing they will agree with them I can not understand.  What happened to live and let live?  I believe that if what someone else is doing doesn’t involve me, doesn’t harm me,  then let that person be them.  Qoutes from the article below.   Oh and when did executive orders become laws?   Did congress get dissolved, or are we now ruled by the whim or the racist bigot hater?  Hugs

According to Liz Mikitarian, a retired kindergarten teacher and the founder of STOP Moms for Liberty, the coordinated efforts to undermine the rights of trans students in Illinois mimic a strategy playing out nationwide.

Parallel Title IX investigations have cropped up in at least 18 educational institutions across 10 states following similar complaints about the policies, including in Wisconsin, California, Kansas, Colorado, North Carolina, New Hampshire and Washington. Some of these led to the Trump administration attempting to cut federal funds from public schools in Minnesota, Virginia and Maine.

“You realize it’s so much bigger when you see all the communities around the country that have dealt with this exact same pattern,” Castro told Uncloseted Media and the Chicago Sun-Times.

“When you already exist in a world where there are no safe places and your government is adding to that, it’s dehumanizing. … I worry about the suicide rate [for trans youth] increasing in Illinois,” Lascano says.

Pat Green, who is still grappling with the bullying his son experienced, shares Lascano’s concerns. “From the time he was born, he had this light,” says Green. “When he was at his old school, it was just gone. … I’m really scared about the way things are right now. I remember the fear of wondering if I was going to lose my son. [These groups] are not protecting children. They are causing so much harm.”


 

 

https://www.unclosetedmedia.com/p/360000-and-counting-school-districts

Parents and advocates say coordinated complaints over transgender students are driving legal fees, security costs and emotional strain across Illinois school districts.