“Freedom is Never Free,” Said the Politicians Never Paying the Price
Freedom costs exactly one invasion every few years, payable in young people
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There is always a sterile moment when the dead are reduced to arithmetic. Before the photographs. Before the hometowns. Before someone finds the boots still by the door. In that liminal space between the blast and the burial, we don’t call them by their names.
We call them casualties.
“We expect casualties with something like this,” President Trump told NBC News after learning of the lost American and Iranian lives. “We have three, but we expect casualties — but in the end it’s going to be a great deal for the world.”
“A great deal.”
Deals are negotiated. Deals have terms. Deals have winners.
The dead do not.
When the death toll rose past Trump’s optimistic casualty estimate, the Republicans went into full political spin and dug up an old war meme.
“Freedom is never free,” Mike Waltz brand-tested on X. (This is the same Mike Waltz who defines freedom as sharing a top-secret Signal chat with an Atlantic journalist, so we already got a shaky starting point.)
If you are of a certain age, you have seen this movie before. “Freedom isn’t free” is rhetorical Febreze. You spray it on top of a complex geopolitical mess, and suddenly it smells like bald eagles.
That’s the stinky problem. Most people think of freedom in the abstract. It’s the ability to speak without being jailed, to vote without being purged, to worship (or not), to marry who you want, to criticize the government without getting defenestrated.
Yeah, so that’s the floor. If your definition of freedom stops at “you won’t be imprisoned for tweeting,” congratulations — you’ve achieved eighteenth-century enlightenment.
But real freedom is agency. It’s the ability to make meaningful choices about your life without economic coercion strangling every option.
Are you free if you can’t afford groceries? Are you free if a medical diagnosis equals bankruptcy? Are you free if leaving a job means losing healthcare? Are you free if rent consumes half your paycheck and your “choice” is between insulin and electricity?
Let’s get real. Most wars are not fought because your neighbor in Ohio is about to lose the right to assemble. They are fought over power, resources, alliances, or someone’s hurt ego. “We can’t look weak,” said the oil that urgently needs liberating.
You know who never says “freedom isn’t free”? The guy in the wheelchair at the VA who’s been waiting nine months for an appointment. He knows what it costs. He doesn’t need the bumper sticker. He’s living the invoice.
But here’s where the patriotic tautology really falls apart. The same Republicans who will send your children to die in a war no one wants will try to convince you that universal healthcare and affordable education are “libtard socialism.” No no no…freedom isn’t free, but school lunches for kids, THAT’S a handout. We can write a blank check to Lockheed Martin, but feeding a nine-year-old is where we draw the line on fiscal responsibility.
So what is the true price of freedom? And why does it always come bundled with expanded defense contracts for billionaires?
Better yet, let’s ask a harder question: Is this particular war actually defending American freedom, or someone else’s bank account? To answer that question, let’s examine some equally squirrelly war slogans that didn’t hold up well.
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“Remember the Maine!” …Forget the deaths (1898)
The USS Maine mysteriously exploded and sank in Havana Harbor in 1898, and the American public, whipped into frenzy by yellow journalism, blamed Spain. The slogan was everywhere. A 1976 naval investigation later determined the explosion most likely resulted from an internal fire igniting the ship’s ammunition — not a Spanish mine.
So the whole war — the seizure of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines — was launched on what was probably an accident. William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer didn’t care. They had papers to sell. 268 sailors died, and their deaths became a marketing campaign for the empire.
“Make the World Safe for Democracy” (1917)
Woodrow Wilson campaigned in 1916 on “He Kept Us Out of War.” And then, after his reelection, he turned around and asked Congress to declare war to save democracy worldwide.
Over 117,000 Americans died. Wilson then passed the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act, crushing dissent at home. He made the world safe for democracy by criminalizing free speech.
And what did “making the world safe for democracy” actually produce? The punitive Treaty of Versailles, which created the exact conditions for the rise of fascism, Nazism, and World War II. Far from making the world safe for democracy, Wilson contributed to the rise of some of the most murderous dictators who ever lived.
“Loose Lips Sink Ships” (1942)
This one’s interesting because it flipped the script — instead of rallying you TO war, it was about making you police yourself and your neighbors. The message was that your casual conversation at the pub could sink a battleship.
The slogan was coined by the War Advertising Council and used by the Office of War Information, with the original iconic poster published by Seagram Distillers for display in bars. So basically, a whiskey company helped the government teach Americans to be suspicious of each other.
Operation Iraqi Freedom — The Branding That Wasn’t
The name itself was a rhetorical marketing deck: Iraqi Freedom. Not “Invasion.” Not “Regime Change.” Freedom. But the advertised reason — weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) — never materialized. Colin Powell stood before the UN Security Council holding a vial of fake anthrax like a QVC host with a doomsday prop.
Powell later called it “a blot on my record.” Sure. Too bad dead soldiers paid for your ink spill.
Meanwhile, Israeli intelligence was, as Brigadier General Shlomo Brom admitted, “a full partner” in painting the picture of Iraq’s weapons capability — a picture that turned out to be fiction.
More than 250,000 soldiers searched the country. They found nothing. There were no weapons of mass destruction.
What they did find was $39.5 billion in contracts flowing to KBR — a subsidiary of Halliburton, formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney. The $7 billion no-bid “Restore Iraqi Oil” contract was awarded before the invasion even started.
4,492 Americans died. Iraqi civilian deaths ranged from 186,000 to over a million.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz later told Vanity Fair that WMDs were chosen as justification because it was “the one issue that everyone could agree on.” Not the real reason. The marketable one.
Operation Epic (Hide the Epstein Files) Fury — “Freedom Isn’t Free”
The origin of the phrase “freedom isn’t free” is a bit murky, but a UK Parliament record quotes President Gerald Ford as saying it in a speech after returning from a NATO meeting in Europe.
It was also used in the 1980s, right in the thick of Reagan’s military buildup against the Soviets. By 1995, the phrase was chiseled into stone on the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
After 9/11, the phrase was used by both conservatives and liberals to describe the tragedy and sacrifices of the American people. The message was that sacrifice was necessary to battle terrorism. Consequently, the Patriot Act was passed, giving the American government considerable surveillance into citizens’ lives.
The Price of Freedom
Are you catching a theme yet? Actual freedom — the civil liberties part — tends to shrink during wartime. Surveillance expands, as evidenced by the recent shakedown of Anthropic. Executive power grows. Dissent gets labeled unpatriotic, and we trade privacy for “security.” We all know what comes next.
War becomes a great excuse for authoritarians to stop an election.
It’s kind of ironic, isn’t it? Throughout history, “Freedom isn’t free” has become the emotional soundtrack used to sell Americans on giving up their own freedoms. The price of freedom, it turns out, was… freedom. It’s like paying for your house by burning it down.
That’s the real function of the phrase. It’s not a statement — it’s a conversation ender. It’s designed to make any follow-up question sound treasonous. “FREEDOM ISN’T FREE.” Discussion over. Now shut up and wave a flag.
“If anyone only learns one thing from this case, I hope it is that money should not let you buy your way free.”— Jane Doe No. 5, EFTA00103908
A “great deal” for America
It was Memorial Day 2017. Trump was visiting Arlington Cemetery with his then-chief of staff, John Kelly, whose son Robert was killed in Afghanistan in 2010 and is buried there. Standing at his son’s grave, Trump turned to Kelly and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”
Let that sink in.
A five-time draft dodger, standing at the grave of his chief of staff’s dead son, asking what the kid got out of dying for his country.
A year later, during a 2018 trip to Paris, Trump refused to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, saying, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with “losers.” During that same visit, he asked aides: “Who were the good guys in World War I?” And then he referred to the 1,800 Marines who died at the Battle of Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.
Dead soldiers are not the only “losers,” according to Trump. At Milley’s 2019 welcome ceremony, Army Captain Luis Avila — who had lost a leg, suffered brain damage, two heart attacks, and two strokes across five combat tours — sang “God Bless America.” Trump congratulated him, then turned to Milley and said, “Why do you bring people like that here? Nobody wants to see that, the wounded.” Then he told Milley to never let Avila appear in public again.
Suckers and losers. That is who Trump thinks pays for freedom. The kind of men and women nobody wants to see. That’s my veteran dad, your brother you lost in some war, and countless friends who that fat purple child diddler calls “losers.”
Republicans are right about one thing. “Freedom isn’t free.” We pay for it. So maybe stop voting to cut the VA budget, stop sending kids to wars you saw on Fox News, and stop pretending a three-word slogan is a substitute for actually giving a damn about the people who will pay the ultimate price.
Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Bravo!
Spot on.
... and where are the offsprings of the career politicians in congress and senate and any admin members "defending freedom" at the frontline?
Send Baron!