Trump, accompanied by Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and other senior officials, arrived by motorcade at Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak and Stone Crab—just a short distance from the White House.
Outside the restaurant, he briefly spoke to reporters, drawing both cheers and chants of “Free Palestine!” Inside, protesters waving Palestinian flags escalated, confronting the President while chanting, “Free DC, free Palestine, Trump is the Hitler of our time.”
Let’s state the obvious: Washington, DC is far freer today than it was before Trump’s crackdown on crime in the capital. As Abraham Maslow noted decades ago, personal freedom rests on safety and security. The idea that safety and freedom exist in tension is a false dichotomy. Without protection from harassment, intimidation, and violence, no one is truly free to exercise their basic rights in public life.
As for equating Trump to Hitler, this is not only absurd, but dangerous. Just as waves of anti-white rhetoric from the progressive left, amplified by mainstream media, fuel racial violence targeting whites, the constant pairing of Trump with Hitler inspires violence against him. Do people have the First Amendment right to make this comparison? Yes. But why do so few leaders condemn it? The reason is plain: they want the rhetoric to persist.
Another urgent question: how did Code Pink get so close to the President, Vice President, and multiple Cabinet members? If even one protester had been armed, House Speaker Mike Johnson might be President today. The Secret Service knows who these radicals are—so why were they allowed within feet of the nation’s top leaders? After Butler, Pennsylvania, where Trump survived an assassination attempt (he was struck by a bullet), and another at his golf club in Florida, the idea that extremists could again get so close is alarming. At what point do we stop chalking these failures up to chance? Could there be something more sinister at play?
For those unfamiliar, Code Pink is a radical activist group led by Medea Benjamin, funded through opaque “dark money” channels. Beyond its rabidly pro-Islamist stance—an ideology that poses a very real threat to freedom and security across North America and Europe—Code Pink is notorious for harassing members of Congress and disrupting House and Senate hearings. The fact that such a group could breach security so easily should deeply concern every American.
Concerning the alleged quote by Benjamin Franklin on the supposed antithesis of security and freedom, the actual quote goes like this: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
This is from a 1755 letter written on behalf of the Pennsylvania Assembly in the context of the French and Indian War (1754–1763). Franklin penned the letter because of a conflict between the Pennsylvania Assembly and the Penn family (the colony’s proprietors). The Assembly wanted to raise funds for frontier defense against American Indian raids during the French and Indian War. The Penn family refused to allow their estates to be taxed. Franklin’s line was aimed at those unwilling to make fair sacrifices for the common defense.
The way this quote is used illustrates the problem of manufactured quotes wrenched from context for propaganda purposes. Franklin distinguished between core freedoms, e.g., self-government and fair taxation, on the one hand, and privileges and protections, namely the Penns’ wealth, shielded from taxation, on the other. In other words, what Franklin wrote is the inverse of what is intended by the manufactured quote Code Pink—and a lot of rightwing libertarians—put on their banners.
Franklin was actually saying this: If you (the Penn family) won’t give up some of your privileges for the sake of collective security, then you deserve neither liberty nor safety. When you understand the actual quote in context, an entirely different principle is laid bare.
freedom and reason 