The video above is of a press conference held Wednesday, July 29, 2026 in Washington, D.C. It begins at the 20-minute mark. Press play. Then read this.
I want to write this note for the public record, not just for you all reading it today. Whoever should find it, maybe decades from now, I want to help you understand what this moment in American life is actually like.
This morning, in a small park within sight of the Capitol dome, a truck arrived carrying 3.5 million pages of documents the most powerful man in the world has spent a year trying to bury. Gathered around it were people who had a lot of reasons to stay home. When you watch the video, what you are seeing are people stitched together by government retaliation and who are taking a risk by speaking.
These include sexual abuse survivors who were doxxed by their own government, whose names and images were exposed in official releases while their abusers’ names stayed hidden behind a redaction pen… citizens who were hunted, investigated, and harassed for the offense of voicing the truth about the president and asking honest questions about his long association with a known criminal… journalists threatened with censorship for reporting on any of it… and still others who learned what it means when the Department of Justice stops being a department of justice.
In one way or another, they all shared an experience they never expected to have in the Land of the Free. That’s because today the abuses of power are palpable. Really palpable. You cannot walk the National Mall without seeing dozens of them. And there’s no one left to protect the dissenter but each other and a court system fighting valiantly to keep the rule of law alive.
No matter what comes of our republic, I want future readers to grasp how serious it got. We’re in a knife’s edge moment. Incredibly, the constitutional defenses built to protect Americans from the vindictiveness of the powerful have been reversed. They’ve been turned into bludgeons swung at the president’s enemies and used to shield his friends with little effort to hide the brazenness of that corruption.
Speak against the president, and you may find a “treason” memo with your name on it… a subpoena at your door… ICE agents or Secret Service agents or FBI agents sent to surveil you (despite knowing they lack the legal grounds)… your security clearance revoked… your business destroyed… your spouse and children threatened with arrest or violent retribution from a mob loyal to the leader… your benefits revoked… your reputation destroyed… or your right to vote threatened with rescission. Some of us have even experienced the majority of those all in the same year.
Stand beside the president, and you may find that your fines evaporate… your case dissolves… your transgressions stay sealed… your federal benefits keep flowing… your property remains unsearched… your business stays intact… your family gets spared… your speech stays free… and — perhaps, if you invest in the leader heavily enough — your fortunes may rise, buoyed by the realization that there is now someone who can and will tip the scales. Can you see why they think the choice is easy?
Here in America in the summer of 2026, it’s widely known that there are two very distinct tiers of justice. There’s a rising risk of punishment for truth-tellers and, evidently, ongoing protection for predators at the highest levels. Everyone you see in this press conference understands that message because they’ve lived it over the course of the past two years.
And yet.
They came anyway. This morning, I watched a group of women step up to the microphone, one after another, and speak about the worst things ever done to them. Horrific things. On the margins of the event, they confessed to me that they knew the retaliation machine was watching, with internet trolls and the defenders of our great leader ready to punish them by nightfall. Sadly, they didn’t have to wait for evening. Pedestrians in Donald Trump’s capital heckled them, with one man sneering and shouting broadsides against survivors of sexual abuse and victims of government retaliation, clearly feeling empowered to do so because he’d been shown that oppressors have a permission slip. At least for now.
The survivors continued speaking anyway. One of them is a mother of four who had to explain to her own children why her trauma had become a national headline and why graphic details of her sexual assault were in the public domain. One of them looked into the cameras and addressed the man who tried to silence her directly: Was it scary? Yes. Did you silence me? Absolutely not. And I won. Then one of them said the sentence I hope outlives all of us: “We should not have to be the most courageous people here.”
She was right. In a functioning republic, courage shouldn’t be the entry fee for justice. You should be able to remain silent if you choose and still believe that your government will not abandon you, let alone pursue you with relentless attempts at censorship (lest you implicate a powerful man). Survivors of a crime shouldn’t need more bravery than U.S. senators, and a working mother shouldn’t need more spine than an attorney general.
But the republic is not functioning. It’s been corrupted in ways that may not be fully documented for many years. The whole point of the rule of law is that ordinary people needn’t go to extraordinary lengths to exercise their rights, yet that’s what they’re having to do. Rather than feel defeated, I watched ordinary people do it this morning and felt pride in knowing that their sacrifice is what’s keeping that republic from withering altogether.
Something remarkable is happening here. The retribution, yes. But much more than that, the defiance. It’s moving through crowds where people step up to microphones instead of hiding. Lately, it seems like it’s happening everywhere. Journalists are suing rather than settling with the government. Judges are issuing sanctions instead of accepting threadbare excuses from Trump’s lawyers. Protesters are filming government agents in their communities as a visible reminder that crimes cannot be committed with impunity. The abuses will be recorded, even if they won’t be remedied until a future Justice Department restores meaning to its name.
By this afternoon, those same Epstein survivors were carrying bound volumes of the Epstein files (that Trump fought so hard to keep hidden) through the doors of the U.S. Capitol and to the desks of the senators who vote tomorrow on whether the man who kept the cover-up going should run America’s top law enforcement agency.
So while the Constitution may be hanging by a thread, I hope generations to come will see how strong that thread actually was. Study this video. You’ll see what the fiber of it is made of. People who refuse to bow, submit, or watch their founding document get reduced to historical window dressing. A mother of four at a microphone — and so many others like her — are preserving the rights of all Americans, even the ones still too scared to speak.
Justice is coming. We’re putting it on four wheels and touring it across America. If our system won’t function the way it should, survivors and dissenters will keep reminding the country how democracy is supposed to function. Even if that means enduring more retaliation, with a stiff spine, as a demonstration that intimidation only succeeds if we allow it.
So, to the reader in 2076, if the rule of law survived to reach you, it was because people like this refused to let go. They kept courage alive when it was scarce and our founding values intact. And if you live in a country where the powerful answer for their crimes and no one is above the law, then that means we handed it to you.
Your friend, in defiance,
P.S. If you want to support our anti-corruption efforts, including to get the Epstein Files in front of as many Americans as possible, go HERE. Also, you can order materials to get the word out HERE, with all proceeds going to the fight.
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