David Brin Spent the Fourth of July Using the Declaration of Independence as an Anti-Trump Weapon

Connie Willis was not the only science fiction author who spent the nation’s 250th birthday publishing political screeds on Facebook. David Brin, winner of two Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards, and a Locus Award, took a different approach. He went historical. The history does not hold up.

Brin’s July 4th post opened with an invitation to re-read the Declaration of Independence, which he then proceeded to misuse. The full post:

“On July 4th I hope Americans will re-read... or recite aloud to neighbors ... the Declaration of Independence. There are many ironies that gird your ‘No Kings!’ vigor. But 2 points?

There’s this line: ‘He (King George) has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.’ Ponder that one. Ironic?

The Declaration makes clear that Congress and the colonies sent multiple missions to plead, remonstrate or negotiate with King and Parliament, including some led by Benjamin Franklin. All efforts failed in the face of feudalist obstinacy and cruel tyranny. But we tried and that is the essence of the Declaration.

‘In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.’

When later Confederate secessionists tried to model their ‘declarations’ after that of 1776, their treason and hypocrisy was laid bare. Because NOT ONE delegation was sent to talk to President Elect Lincoln. Not.. even... one.

Nor could they point to any grievances at all! Except northern states refusing to shut down abolitionist newspapers. Look it up. That’s it!

They had none of the excuses for severing sworn bonds that Jefferson listed earlier as necessary, in order to justify cutting bonds of sworn loyalty. None. Not one. They were simply traitors. And the same psychological movement - yammering/whining/blustering heirs of Jefferson Davis - are doing likewise, today.

God and destiny and hard work Bless America, whose 80 year Pax has given the world and humanity (by far) their best era, ever. Plus fostering the sagacity and science to pick up the tools of creation and engender new kinds of beautiful minds. And one hopes also for wisdom.

May those new children of mostly American minds choose enlightenment and justice and go - and a little grateful patriotism - and help their country weather this storm and remain a beacon to the world... ...and to the galaxy.”

Let’s go through this.

Brin’s first point quotes the clause about King George obstructing naturalization of foreigners and asks his readers to find it “ironic,” the implication being that Trump’s immigration enforcement mirrors George III’s tyranny. The comparison collapses immediately under examination. King George was blocking immigration to prevent the growth of a self-governing colonial population that threatened British control. The colonists wanted more settlers to build a free society. The current administration is enforcing laws passed by Congress to stop illegal entry into a sovereign nation.

But here is the part Brin does not address. Illegal immigration as it currently operates is not a humanitarian system, but instead is a pipeline for corporate slave labor. Undocumented workers cannot legally assert their rights, cannot organize, cannot demand minimum wage enforcement, and cannot sue when exploited. The corporations who benefit from this arrangement pay them below market wages, pocket the difference, and externalize the social costs onto the communities where those workers live. If anything, the immigration enforcement Brin is implicitly defending by invoking King George is the system that enables the exploitation. Trump’s policies, whatever one thinks of their execution, target the illegal labor pipeline that suppresses wages for American workers, including the poorest and most vulnerable. A king blocking immigration to maintain colonial control is not the same as a republic enforcing its borders to prevent the corporate exploitation of illegal labor. Brin is a physicist who advises Google and Microsoft on technology trends. He knows the difference between an analogy and an equivalence. He chose not to apply that distinction here.

The second point has Brin correctly noting that the Confederate states sent no delegation to Lincoln before seceding, unlike the colonists who exhausted diplomatic channels before declaring independence. Lincoln had been elected legally, had not yet taken office, and had not threatened slavery where it already existed. The Confederate states simply left. What Brin gets wrong is his characterization of their grievances. He claims their only complaint was “northern states refusing to shut down abolitionist newspapers.” He told his readers to look it up. They should.

The Confederate articles of secession were fundamentally about the doctrine of states’ rights, the principle that individual states retained sovereign authority over their own affairs against federal overreach. Slavery was the immediate flash point, but the underlying constitutional argument was whether Washington could dictate the domestic institutions of member states against their expressed will. That argument did not die at Appomattox. It lives in every debate about federal mandates, regulatory authority, and local governance today. Brin reduces a complex constitutional crisis to a single sentence about newspapers, then draws a straight line from Jefferson Davis to the current administration. Neither reduction holds up.

But it really breaks down with his global implication that the current administration represents the same “psychological movement” as Confederate secessionists, which the fourth time in this publication’s recent coverage that a prominent science fiction figure has compared Trump or his supporters to either Nazis or traitors on or around the Fourth of July. Connie Willis called it a “Nazi regime.” Brin calls Trump’s supporters the “yammering/whining/blustering heirs of Jefferson Davis.” Tim Russ, who plays Tuvok on Star Trek: Voyager, called Texas teaching Bible passages “Christian Sharia law.” Celia Rose Gooding, who plays Uhura on Starfleet Academy, told a convention audience that unnamed institutions are trying to keep everyone “depressed and low vibrational.” Sunny Hostin said the American flag makes her feel threatened.

Brin has been at this longer than most. He published Polemical Judo in 2020, explicitly framing American political life as a “life or death struggle for civilization” in which Republicans wage war on “fact-based professions.” He has maintained a political blog since 2004. He describes American history as an ongoing “eight-phase Civil War” between Enlightenment forces and Confederate ones, in which he has assigned himself to the correct side. He criticized Tolkien for depicting an “elitist social structure” and called Star Wars “anti-democratic” — views which, like his July 4th post, reveal a man who processes everything through a single political frame regardless of the subject matter.

The irony Brin missed is that the Declaration he quoted was written by men who owned slaves, in a republic that took nearly a century to abolish slavery and another century to enforce civil rights, which has nonetheless produced what Brin himself calls “by far the best era humanity has ever had.” The document survived its authors’ contradictions because it contained principles larger than the men who wrote it. Jefferson knew what he was putting on paper. The gap between the Declaration’s stated ideals and the reality of American life in 1776 was not hypocrisy to be wielded as a weapon — it was a promissory note that the country spent the next 250 years trying to honor.

That is the story of the Fourth of July. Brin spent his post trying to make it a story about Jefferson Davis, a comparison with zero correlation to anything happening in Washington today.

David Brin has won more major science fiction awards than almost anyone writing today. The science fiction establishment has given him every honor it has. He spent the nation’s 250th birthday calling half the country Confederate traitors while misquoting their grievances. When will these authors realize that constantly attacking their country with nonsense turns off their readership?

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