As America approaches its 250th birthday on July 4, a debate is growing about what it means to be an American.
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch waded into the conversation last month by asserting in an interview that America is <a href="https://x.com/NRO/status/2052080018449137691">“a creedal nation.”</a> According to Gorsuch, “what unites us is not a religion, it’s not a race, it’s a belief” in the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.
For some, those remarks were fighting words.
On social media, Gorsuch was quickly denounced as “<a href="https://x.com/StevenDeLay4/status/2052157802806657254">a traitor</a>” who was spouting <a href="https://x.com/realJeremyCarl/status/2052129536528331115">“nonsense” and “claptrap.”</a>
Critics of America as a creedal nation like to think of themselves as the vanguard of a popular new movement, especially among conservative Christians. But <a href="https://www.discovery.org/a/new-survey-americans-defined-by-belief-in-americas-founding-ideals-not-by-ancestry-or-religion/">a newly released survey</a> of 2,500 Americans conducted by Discovery Institute undercuts that claim.
Respondents were asked, “in your view, for someone to truly be an American, which attributes should they have?”
Six in 10 said that to truly be an American, someone should embrace “the ideas expressed by the Declaration of Independence” and “the form of government created by the Constitution.” Seven in 10 said that to be a true American, one “should agree with the freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights.”
By contrast, only 3.2% of respondents said people “should be descended from an ancestor from Britain or Europe” to truly be an American, and only 16.8% thought that true Americans needed to “agree with Christianity.”
With minor variations, these overall results hold across all major demographics, including political ideology.
For example, 97% of self-identified Christian conservatives reject British/European ancestry as a requirement to be a true American, and 69% of Christian conservatives reject the idea that someone needs to agree with Christianity in order to be a true American.
These results reflect how deeply ingrained the creedal nation idea remains in the American psyche.
Some claim the idea of America as a creedal nation was invented by post-World War II liberals. But America’s Founders proclaimed limited government, unalienable rights, equality under God, and the consent of the governed because they believed these were universal truths. Accordingly, from the early years of the republic, they held up those principles as applicable to all people everywhere.
Catholic Charles Carroll was the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence. Reflecting on the Declaration’s 50th anniversary in 1826, he recommended: “to the present and future generations the principles of that important document, as the best earthly inheritance their ancestors could bequeath to them; and pray[ed] that the civil and religious liberties they have secured to my country may be perpetuated to remotest posterity, and extended to the whole family of man.”
By 1921, the uniqueness of America as a creedal nation was so apparent to others around the world that Englishman G.K. Chesterton declared, “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.”
Contrary to some critics, being a creedal nation does not require America to allow unlimited immigration. In fact, America’s founding principles provide a principled reason for keeping out all those who do not support its creed — and for making sure native-born Americans are taught America’s creed as well.
That said, the more thoughtful critics of the “creedal nation” idea are correct to insist that culture matters as well as creed. Here, they have a legitimate gripe with Justice Gorsuch, who seemed overly dismissive of culture, remarking, “Our nation is not founded on a religion. It’s not based on a common culture even, or heritage.”
In truth, creeds develop from — and are sustained by — culture. That includes religion.
The idea that all humans are created equal, for example, grew out of the Bible. This fact was widely recognized by America’s founders, regardless of their own faith convictions.
Physician Benjamin Rush was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a devout Christian. He argued that the Bible was the book “above all others” that “favors … equality among mankind.” Pamphleteer Thomas Paine was a deist who rejected the Bible as supernatural revelation, but on this point he agreed with Rush. Paine traced the idea of human equality back to “the Mosaic account of the creation.”
Americans are right to be concerned about culture. But instead of repudiating our founding creed or suggesting its truths are limited to people of a certain race or religion, we should be working to rebuild the institutions needed to support that creed.
***
John G. West is the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Endowed-Our-Creator-Science-Americas/dp/1637120877/">Endowed by Our Creator</a> (DI Press, 2026) and vice president of the Discovery Institute. He is also the Distinguished Scholar of American Government and Christian Civic Engagement at Cornerstone University.

Stars and Stripes flag of the United States

The Makings Of Americans

America 250

American culture

American History

DW Opinion

Founding Fathers

Untitled design – 2026-06-15T134541.807

25 Books On The Founding Fathers To Read For America 250

Abraham Lincoln

Alexander Hamilton

American Revolution

Books

In just a few weeks, America turns 250 years old.
That’s honestly staggering when you stop and think about it. History is filled with kingdoms, empires, and nations that rose fast, burned bright, and disappeared just as quickly. Freedom, self-government, and individual liberty are not the historical norm. They’re rare. Fragile. Hard-earned things.
And yet here we are.
A little over a year ago, I found myself wrestling with a question I couldn’t quite shake: What could I possibly contribute to a moment this significant in our nation’s story?
The answer surprised me.
Write a novel.
Not because the world desperately needed another book, but because I kept hearing people — adults and kids alike — talk about history as if it were lifeless, dry, boring, and disconnected from real human emotion. Meanwhile, I looked around at our culture and saw something else happening: a country increasingly disconnected from sacrifice, gratitude, shared identity, and the understanding of what it actually costs to build and preserve this experiment called America.
And I think people are starving for stories that reconnect them to those things.
That’s where The Unlikely Life of Oliver Atkinson came from.
I want readers to feel the founding of this nation again — not as a chapter in a textbook, but as something dangerous, uncertain, human, and alive. I want them to step into the fear, courage, faith, loss, and hope of ordinary people caught inside extraordinary times.
So I imagined America’s founding through the eyes of a young orphan and indentured servant who suddenly finds himself swept into the chaos of the Boston Tea Party aboard one of the very ships that were raided that night. Eventually, he’s taken in by Paul Revere and introduced to the world of the Sons of Liberty, where he comes of age as the nation itself is born.
But the deeper truth is this: Oliver’s story really isn’t about Oliver alone.
It’s about us.
Because America itself was young then. Vulnerable. Divided. Uncertain of whether it would survive. The Founders weren’t marble statues standing frozen in perfection. They were flesh-and-blood human beings trying to hold together an impossible dream under enormous pressure. Farmers. Printers. Merchants. Mothers. Soldiers. Clergymen. Imperfect people carrying unimaginable weight.
And the more I researched, the more I realized how much they risked.
When the signers pledged “their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor,” those weren’t poetic words for a history classroom wall. If they lost, many of them would have been executed as traitors.
My own ancestor, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, signed his name boldly enough that the British would know exactly who he was. He had wealth, status, comfort — everything to lose. Yet he signed anyway.
Why?
Because some things are bigger than comfort.
Some things are worth sacrifice.
And I think deep down, Americans still know that.
That’s part of why stories like this matter right now. We live in a time where cynicism is easy, division is constant, institutions are mistrusted, and national identity itself is often treated as something embarrassing or dangerous rather than something worth understanding, protecting, and improving.
But people still hunger for meaning. They still long for courage. They still respond to stories of sacrifice, conviction, faith, redemption, and purpose. They want to believe there are still things bigger than self-interest.
That hunger is everywhere right now.
And maybe that’s because beneath all the noise, Americans still want to reconnect with who we are, not in some simplistic or sanitized way, but honestly. With humility. With gratitude. With perspective.
America has never been perfect. The Founders knew that. But they also understood something modern people sometimes forget: freedom requires virtue, sacrifice, responsibility, courage, and citizens willing to preserve it.
Benjamin Franklin famously said we had been given “a republic, if you can keep it.”
Two hundred and fifty years later, that question still hangs in the air.
As we approach this remarkable milestone in our history, maybe the best thing we can do is remember. Remember what was risked. Remember what was built. Remember the people who gave everything so future generations might have the chance to live freely.
That’s ultimately why I wrote The Unlikely Life of Oliver Atkinson.
Not simply to entertain people — though I hope it does that too — but to help readers feel connected to the courage, sacrifice, faith, and fragile hope that helped give birth to this nation in the first place.
***
David Jones III is a historical fiction writer living in Myrtle Beach. His book, The Unlikely Life of Oliver Atkinson, is available on <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unlikely-Life-Oliver-Atkinson/dp/1630620912">Amazon</a>. More: <a href="http://davidjones3.com/">davidjones3.com</a>

Battle of Bennington flag

America 250 Comes To Life Through The Power Of Story

Patriotism

The famous “Shot heard ’round the world” was fired at the Battle of Lexington in April 1775, a year before the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. That day has been <a href="https://www.bpl.org/blogs/post/a-brief-history-of-patriots-day/">recognized</a> in Massachusetts as Patriots’ Day — commonly known as “Marathon Monday” — since 1894, and seven other states have followed suit with the most recent <a href="https://le.utah.gov/~2025/bills/static/HCR007.html">in 2025</a>.
New York should be the next state to recognize Patriots’ Day. That’s what I’ll pursue if elected to the State Assembly.
My district already celebrates a version of the holiday. Since 2015, the Three Village Historical Society has hosted Culper Spy Day, drawing history enthusiasts from across New York to the hamlet of Setauket on Long Island. “It was here that the nation’s first spy ring operated in secrecy,” <a href="https://www.culper.com/culperspyday">writes</a> the historical society, “providing General George Washington with critical information that helped turn the tide of the American Revolution.”
Indeed, Setauket native Benjamin Tallmadge was a close friend of Nathan Hale during their time at Yale. Following Hale’s execution by the British for espionage, Tallmadge recruited his neighbor back home, Abraham Woodhull, to lead a new spy ring that <a href="https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/culper-spy-ring">helped</a> reveal the treason of Benedict Arnold. Washington himself may have suggested the alias “Culper,” after Culpeper County, Virginia.
It’s a tale portrayed in the hit TV series, “Turn: Washington’s Spies.” Fans of the show will recognize the names Tallmadge and Woodhull, as well as Caleb Brewster and Anna Strong — all real people who lived in Setauket. Margo Arceri, the <a href="https://www.culper.com/about">founder</a> of Culper Spy Day, shared that her tours have exploded in popularity since the AMC drama premiered in 2014. When I visited Woodhull’s grave, it was <a href="https://www.facebook.com/share/18bRHRtUMa/">decorated</a> with numerous rocks, coins, and American flags.
Now Congress has taken notice. Last month, a bipartisan pair of Long Island congressmen <a href="https://suozzi.house.gov/media/press-releases/suozzi-introduces-bipartisan-bill-remember-washingtons-spy-ring-and-celebrate">introduced</a> legislation to designate a new National Historic Trail connecting key sites used by the spy ring. “As America approaches its 250th birthday,” said Rep. Nick LaLota, “Congress should recognize that without the Culper Spy Ring, General George Washington may never have turned the tide of the Revolution and set the United States on the path to becoming the greatest nation in the world.”
Yet this history is not taught in New York public schools. According to the state’s <a href="https://www.nysed.gov/sites/default/files/programs/standards-instruction/ss-framework-k-8a2.pdf">K-8 Social Studies Framework</a>, “The outcome of the American Revolution was influenced by military strategies, geographic considerations, the involvement of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and other Native American groups in the war, and aid from other nations” — no mention of intelligence. I personally remember learning about the upstate Erie Canal, but not the spy ring in my own backyard.
Patriots’ Day would not only educate our youth; it would stimulate our economy. The Boston Marathon, for example, is <a href="https://www.baa.org/news/boston-marathonr-returns-patriots-day-first-time-three-years/">estimated</a> to inject approximately $200 million into the Massachusetts economy each year. Why not host a Patriots’ Day Parade in New York? It would be poetic justice to march through the former Loyalist stronghold and British military headquarters.
New York politics has become very negative. Taxes are too high; criminals are being released without bail; antisemitism is off the charts. All of that is true. But we also need a positive vision for our state, and that starts with appreciating our history.
Patriots’ Day is something every New Yorker can get behind. Perhaps even Mayor Mamdani would attend the parade.
***
Will Sussman is the Republican and Conservative nominee for New York State Assembly District 4, which includes Setauket and the surrounding region of Suffolk County. Follow him on X @realWillSussman.

TOPSHOT-US-PATRIOTS DAY-CELEBRATION

Make Patriots’ Day A New York State Holiday

Lexington

Marathon Day

New York

Patriots' Day

Revolutionary War

Traveling southwest on the Catalina Highway toward the heart of Tucson, twisting and descending through Coronado National Forest, where the rock-hewn vistas meet the high, bright blue of sky that swallows any fear that God does not exist. It is such a place where one would expect to be surrounded by the radiating waves of heat on a baking blacktop, as a spectator to some aged, weathered vaquero of the lost ages of the Wild West.
You can see it as you fall out of the prehistoric heat-swell of the canyons and mountains, each pitched against the other as if they were remnants of a war between Greek gods, scars and fissures, and the heaving of the earth: Tucson. The oldest city in the Arizona Territory that maintains its ties to the dusty wiles of its past through old, glorified museums, sun-faded rodeos, and capital-A Americana. The gunslinger and wagon-bound settler and the Indian and the law. They converge on a place that can still barely maintain its proper sense of being, balanced with tourist thirst traps. Along that highway through God’s country back to the terra firma of the U-S-of-A and one can pass the Trail Dust Town with its mock gunfights and chintzy steak house (complete with cowbell-ringing waitresses outfitted with hip-slung blue jeans and soft drawls welcoming you, “Darlin’”), and gift shops with sterling silver baubles outlined in turquoise and fool’s gold, and Kachina dolls, and paperweights of smooth glass encasing tarantulas, scorpions, and the various genus of poisonous vermin and arachnid that scuttles about the desert floor. And the tourists ramble into the shops crammed together, peering at the oddities and treasures on equally crammed shelves with wide grins and sweaty necks and bellies full of steakhouse T-bones and smelling of baked beans and Western dressing.
Ask any of the shopkeepers who run the little enclave of strung-together gift stores, hot sauce and salsa shops, jewelers, novelty stands and Western wear haberdasheries — strike up a conversation that starts with a statement, but is really a question: “I bet you’ve seen a lot of changes here,” and let a Roy Murrow or Abe Walker or Sherri Lantis ramble about the Walmart on Speedway Boulevard or the In-N-Out Burger off South Kolb Road, or the damn university kids, and one gets a sense, just by the tired, crow’s feet-lined frowns and deep, distant eyes on wizened faces that there’s something that’s lost. What once was the destination of the kid who dreamed of Roy Rogers and John Wayne’s “Stagecoach” and the Earps, whose soundtrack was the slow, rap-rap-rap tempo of boot heels on raised-plank boardwalks accompanied by the ominous jingle of well-used spurs, had been buried with the myth that brought it fame, notoriety — and crowds.
Speeding south into Tucson where Catalina terminates, joining Tanque Verde — a mainline road banking east to west with a slow curve south over the Pantano Wash, past the Trail Dust Town, past the pop-up cannabis shop, Golf ‘N Stuff, a series of squat, adobe-style apartments — the two-level kind with Spanish tile roofs and centered around a courtyard overrun with thorny catclaw acacia, prickly pear, and Larrea tridentata with its tiny yellow-tinged, waxy flowers giving that decidedly rain smell after a rolling storm.
Then, take a straight shot south on Pantano until you run up to the airfield. The airfield. Stretches of planes, comatose and covered, baking in the unrelenting sun, swirls of heat rising between wings and shadowed bellies of hulking P-3 Orions and E-3C AWACS. All around the gray metal beasts sit silently in formation: here, C-130s, there, A-10 Warthogs, farther down field, one can make out the sleek, streamlined lethality of a grouping of F-16s with each seam and gap meticulously wrapped and sealed as if the very desert would cause the second death of these retired warriors. Where once they hunted and evaded the enemy as rulers of the sky, now the planes were at its mercy in the arid, unceasing desert heat.
This isn’t any airfield. This is Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, where 3,500 retired or stored aircraft sit, month after month, waiting for their fate either to be cannibalized or revived into former air superiority glory.
The story of these planes isn’t contained between Alvernon Way and South Houghton Road. It bleeds out into the desert. It creeps out like ghosts in the night, haunting the dreams of young men — those who used to dream of gunfights and horse trails and warm whisky in dark saloons and the jingle of spurs on hollow boardwalks. Now, they dream of going Mach 5.29, burning jet fuel, puking their insides out on test flights, and pushing the boundaries of the impossible because they refuse the idea of the impossible.
Before the movie Top Gun was made, it was a story in a magazine. The May 1983 issue of California magazine was sitting in a dentist&#8217;s office when film producer Don Simpson picked it up, read a few pages, and immediately, in his guts, knew: this was a film that had to be made. This was a story of speed, adventure, danger, excellence, masculinity, death-defying, gravity-breaking, pulse-pounding adventure that had to be told. And he was right. And only a man who refused to be bound by the constraints of the physically possible and psychologically normal could see and recognize the American essence in this story. Never mind that Simpson was notoriously fueled by cocaine and booze — a man who took his filmmaking and partying with equal passion and determination. He tapped into the veins of what made America’s blood pump. After all, he was altogether unfazed by the death of his drug rehab coach in his pool house, naked. The temptation to bring this story to the big screen was too strong. The article’s author, Ehud Yonay, writes in “Top Guns”:
<blockquote>
Once over the Mexican border they pick up speed, and Yogi starts jinking. He whips the stick — the steering mechanism between his legs — from side to side and the plane rolls this way and that, letting him and Possum spot anybody making for their tail. From where they sit, however, it&#8217;s not their silver rocket that&#8217;s rocking but the entire vast blue dome of sea and sky. There are no ups or downs up here, no rights or lefts, just a barely perceptible line separating one blue from another, and that line is spinning and racing like mad in the distance. Yogi was still in junior high school when he realized that flying straight and level might be okay for some people, but if you like yanking and banking — the feeling of riding inside one of those storm-in-a-bottle souvenirs — then there&#8217;s just one place for you, and that&#8217;s the cockpit of a fighter plane. 
</blockquote>
Now we have willow-fingered suss-gussets picking through the bones of our Americana like vultures on a highway roadkill, stinking and bubbling in the sun, the last soul that dared venture out under the cover of night to be barreled over by a rust-colored Buick Skylark.
Capital-A Americana has been worn smooth over the decades by a culture that bristles at hard things. What once was the stuff that made legends has turned into cautionary tales. “Go West” was the slogan of the intrepid and the bold; now merely a bumper sticker catch phrase for glamping outlets and secret sauce limited-time burgers at Arby’s.
We’ve had the essence of Americana squeezed out of us by intellectuals and ivory-tower academics and wannabe sophisticates wholesale by industrial-grade juicers, strained through a dozen gauzy layers of cheesecloth by the strangling hands of PC-mindedness, and sent through the clinking and clamoring bureaucracy like miles of twisting, nonsensical pipes, sloshing along until our Americanness has been sterilized and ostracized and thinned out to be wholly unrecognizable.
There is no toughness, no fortitude into the unknown, no unforged paths, no aspirations toward the conquest: it’s been conditioned out of us. Then those same mawing shrieks who scold the veritable past squeeze harder.
Is the Americana ethos extinct?
There are many who want it to be. Those who take the “boy” out of Boy Scout, who allow Top Gun its theatrical moment but snub it at awards shows. Who see Sydney Sweeney in blue jeans and believe it’s a racist dog whistle. Who hear Lana Del Rey and dismiss her as a conservative avatar. And it’s politicians who “support our troops” but trash masculinity — the very trait that makes an effective warrior who he is. They are the inevitable heirs of condescending culture gatekeepers who castigated “ticky-tacky” mid-20th-century homes that housed the heroes of WWII, right along with the values and mores that enabled them to fight and win.
Even at the Olympics, we went from wearing cowboy hats to Ralph Lauren beanies. Even our astronauts talk in soothing half-tones and repeat unremarkable Urban Dictionary pop-culture catchphrases of a Girl Scout Troop dad, rather than the successors to the first-generation astronauts forged by WWII, the frozen hell of Korea, and death-defying flights piloting experimental aircraft.
Walk through the boneyard and feel the men who stood there. Men at war. Men who smoked Lucky Strikes, chewed Beeman’s gum, and pushed the limits of physical and spiritual stamina. They blasted off through the bleak desert rock toward heaven itself. Young men mocking the sky gods with a smirk and boldness and squaring up to Death as if to say, “Go ahead, old man, give it your best. I dare you.” It was the embodiment of single combat: man battling his fears and self-doubt.
The American Empire is an ethos. It is a conquering force against our own trepidation and despondency as much as against the foolish, pretentious legions who repeatedly count us out. When men aspire to greatness, America achieves it.
People are quick to dismiss the current rise in nostalgia for an era before social media, the firehose of stimulation of the information age, and siloed experiences. But they are mistaking nostalgia for a gnawing awareness that something is missing. And it’s correct to feel this way because something is — that thing squeezed and crushed and mashed and forced through an extruder until all that remains is a shredded pulp: The American spirit.  The American, in his set-jaw determination toward freedom, who holds the map to forgotten places, who hears “Go West” as a challenge, not a joke; the dreamer, the drifter, the risk-taker. He is the protector, the warrior, and the builder.
These are men who understand that when they climb on that horse or sit in that jet or board a spaceship, they might not come home. They understand that death is the price for living. That hard things done by hard men are necessary for the continuation and building of a society that only knows the frictionless world of modernity.
“Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated,” wrote Ernest Hemingway, in his gruff confidence, the writer who spared no kindness for self-inflicted weakness; no mercies for guilt-ridden lamentations of the relentlessly torpid. In a man’s life, resilience defines his unyielding core — the victory of single combat — man versus his own fear.
Reclaim the essence of the American spirit; it&#8217;s still out there in the midst of the boneyards and tumbleweeds, inhospitable except to the man who dares forge his path on his own terms — not for nostalgia, or wide-smiling gawkers, or to keep the bone-picking vultures away, but because his spirit demands it.
***

Punch 5-5 – Fly Me to the Moon-1

The American Ethos And The Ghosts Of The West

This expands on Batya Ungar-Sargon&#8217;s new book, “The Jews and the Left”, which comes out June 2. It can be <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Jews-Left-Batya-Ungar-Sargon/dp/0063460602/ref=sr_1_1?crid=G5R8O5XK6E17&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.pNjU3_fK4eAsZbayBDokigtYNHKhIITEvZFnoJTm733ZW9iP4qrvRK1OOd0gDHI5LLvjlxBrz2nXvEDi5mDFjGpQ7S-NT_TSbgD4we0x52c-EQWmZP8OHm8XGc77WZhpGtnriyC518aTzzT2O_xSIqeZeCiUPN11ECHbdfu6UORZ5g6wp1thy4K89YcYjCzRdd3T34lpDTJJ99w4lq3xhLMKP_CC-8v3249SwsHgJNA.bexFT88cDU3xjuJKV7aKb9LHY8FP5sNVbwBPYlO4iqw&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=the+jews+and+the+left&amp;qid=1779105722&amp;sprefix=%2Caps%2C98&amp;sr=8-1">ordered here</a>. 
There’s an amazing video making the rounds on social media in which a host on MSNOW tried to sneeringly mock House Speaker Mike Johnson for daring to suggest that “our rights do not derive from government; they come from our creator.”
&nbsp;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-media-max-width="560">
&#8220;What about this passage from Mike Johnson declaring that our rights do not derive from government; they come from our creator&#8230; Is this him putting God above the Declaration of Independence?&#8221;
Truly the MSNBC clip to end all MSNBC clips.<a href="https://t.co/Fy72cVrkgN">pic.twitter.com/Fy72cVrkgN</a>
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) <a href="https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/2056581011077562862?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 19, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
I usually hate to join a pile-on when a person has made a mistake of this kind. But the gaffe didn’t just reveal a shocking level of ignorance; it combined that ignorance seamlessly with the sneering contempt that characterizes today’s Left. After all, the thought the host found so worthy of snide mockery is literally the belief that underwrites the entire American project.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” reads the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. This was the most fundamental belief from which every other freedom stemmed: Our Founding Fathers believed our rights were granted by God and thus inalienable. It was the government’s job to protect those sacred rights, not grant them.
This idea is also crucial to the story of the Jews in America, as I explore at great length in my new book “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Jews-Left-Batya-Ungar-Sargon/dp/0063460602/ref=sr_1_1?crid=38NNGMUAQI3PX&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.pNjU3_fK4eAsZbayBDokigtYNHKhIITEvZFnoJTm730r1XWYyJcN89lKaNm69218bzwvGO10w9R9k5cQA5W3-z92gDBQnT0Uju4Ii0DM6EAWt1y3WcjngQDwcj3xFk_NpXtrqUWcx_AiBJW0TGX6MCgBm5zRwe58ISo-eairfyT9jgFo3ish8J1MvTrWCdc5QE8jJy9OOHrd0wSpQ5-D-5T0k-6ZUy68i8Td-TtiF9Q.1gzjWir5005k39QmLZA4ytPF365dHcmAF7gDJvk1Yl4&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=the+jews+and+the+left&amp;qid=1779197651&amp;sprefix=%2Caps%2C102&amp;sr=8-1">The Jews and the Left</a>,” which comes out in a few weeks. In President George Washington’s famous letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790, the president invokes this fundamental concept to make sure Jews understood that things would be different here.
Washington’s famous letter was written after a trip he made to Rhode Island, which had been the last of the 13 states to ratify the Constitution. “Now that Rhode Island had reknit the old ties, he would go there, meet the leaders, see the people and make it plain that he no longer kept in his heart the resentments the petty spokesman of the little State had aroused,” <a href="https://archive.org/details/georgewashington0006free_s4u7/page/274/mode/2up?view=theater">writes</a> Washington’s biographer, Douglas Southall Freeman.
At his arrival, the president was greeted by the town clergy, among them Moses Seixas, president of the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, who would later become the cashier of the Bank of Rhode Island. Along with the other members of the local clergy, Seixas had written a letter to the president, which was read aloud at a ceremonial breakfast. (Also read to the president was a letter written by another local Jew, one Mr. Jacob Isaacks, who claimed to be able to distill “by a very simple apparatus” sweet water from ocean water. Alas, he could not.)
When the president returned to Philadelphia, he sat down to reply to three of the addresses, among them Seixas’s. Both Seixas’s letter and the president’s were <a href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030483/1790-09-15/ed-1/?sp=4&amp;st=image&amp;r=0.116,1.043,0.95,0.536,0">published</a> in the newspaper.
“Sir,” began Seixas’s address, “Permit the children of the stock of Abraham, to approach you, with the most cordial affection and esteem for your person and merits — and to join with our fellow citizens in welcoming you to NewPort.”
“Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free citizens, we now (with a deep sense of gratitude to the almighty disposer of all events) behold a government erected by the MAJESTY OF THE PEOPLE — a government, which to bigotry gives no sanction — to persecution no assistance; but generously affording to ALL liberty of conscience, and immunities of citizenship: Deeming every one of whatever nation, tongue or language, equal parts of the great governmental machine,” wrote Seixas.
Seixas was laying out the contract that the fledgling country had made with its citizens, including those belonging to religious minorities. With words that would become famous when the president repeated them back in his own letter, Seixas offered up to the president a summary of the unique compact America had granted its Jews: to give “bigotry no sanction — persecution no assistance.”
Yet Seixas ended his letter thanking not the president but God, who imbued us with the rights that the United States government would commit to protecting.
The federal union is “the work of the great God, who ruleth in the armies of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth,” wrote Seixas, and thus, “For all the blessings of civil and religious liberty, which we enjoy under an equal and benign administration, we desire to send up our thanks to the ancient of days, the great preserver of men, beseeching him that the Angel who conducted our forefathers through the wilderness into the promised land, may graciously conduct you thro all the difficulties and dangers of this mortal life.”
Seixas’ message was clear: The government of the United States didn’t create equal rights — God did.
Seixas didn’t invent this distinction, of course; he was referencing that central organizing principle written in the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson.
That’s why some believe that it was Jefferson who actually wrote Washington’s response to the Jews of Newport, or at least he added a significant line to it.
Washington’s letter quotes Seixas’s verbatim, expanding on the theme Seixas laid out — most crucially, the distinction between religious tolerance and religious freedom: “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights,” wrote Washington. “For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”
This distinction between religious tolerance and religious freedom was critical. It was the difference between rights given by government (tolerance) and rights granted by God (freedom). And it defined what it means to be an American: It means zealously protecting our rights as a gift of God rather than the result of the sufferance of our neighbors or government.
Of course, it takes a person of a different faith to even arrive at such an idea, and while the distinction was not invented for the Jews, Jews would become a symbol for the high ideals this country was founded on.
Putting a bow on the idea, Washington wrote the words that came to symbolize what so many Jews had come to hope for since setting foot on American shores some 100 years earlier, that this was to be our promised land, after millennia of persecution. The words Washington wrote never fail to bring tears to my eyes as I read them: “May the children of the stock of Abraham” — again, borrowing from Seixas — “who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants — while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
***
This is republished by permission from the author from her newsletter.
Batya Ungar-Sargon is a NewsNation weekend anchor and the author of the forthcoming book &#8220;The Jews and the Left&#8221; from HarperCollins. Subscribe to her daily newsletter at <a href="http://batya-us.com/">batya-us.com</a>.

George Washington At Valley Forge

Hey MSNOW — Our Rights Do, In Fact, Come From God

Jewish Americans

For the full story of why Jewish Americans felt so deeply connected to the Civil Rights Movement, why they became Democrats in the first place, and why the Left has turned on the Jews, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Jews-Left-Batya-Ungar-Sargon/dp/0063460602/ref=sr_1_1?crid=G5R8O5XK6E17&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.pNjU3_fK4eAsZbayBDokigtYNHKhIITEvZFnoJTm733ZW9iP4qrvRK1OOd0gDHI5LLvjlxBrz2nXvEDi5mDFjGpQ7S-NT_TSbgD4we0x52c-EQWmZP8OHm8XGc77WZhpGtnriyC518aTzzT2O_xSIqeZeCiUPN11ECHbdfu6UORZ5g6wp1thy4K89YcYjCzRdd3T34lpDTJJ99w4lq3xhLMKP_CC-8v3249SwsHgJNA.bexFT88cDU3xjuJKV7aKb9LHY8FP5sNVbwBPYlO4iqw&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=the+jews+and+the+left&amp;qid=1779105722&amp;sprefix=%2Caps%2C98&amp;sr=8-1">order Batya&#8217;s book</a> “The Jews and the Left,” from which this is an excerpt. It comes out on June 2.
***
Last week, during NYU’s commencement, <a href="https://x.com/HenMazzig/status/2054973808524611888">a flag was seen</a> flying above one of the university’s buildings. It bore two swastikas on either side of a Jewish star. It was shocking to see, not least because of what it was proof of: The swastika, that symbol of genocidal Right-wing intent against Jews, has been appropriated by the Left, which uses it to call Jews Nazis and to accuse Jews of the Nazi crime of genocide.
How did this happen? How did the Left appropriate the Right’s antisemitic hatred? So shocking is this reversal that if you stop most American Jews on the street in America and ask them where the threat of violence to Jews comes from, most will still tell you that it comes from the Right. Our history of belonging to the Left and fearing the Right is so deeply ingrained that many are simply not able to assimilate this information — that now it’s Republicans that denounce antisemitism and Democrats who cover for it, enable it, promote it.
But what if our historical understanding was wrong too?
That’s what I learned while researching <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Jews-Left-Batya-Ungar-Sargon/dp/0063460602/ref=sr_1_1?crid=G5R8O5XK6E17&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.pNjU3_fK4eAsZbayBDokigtYNHKhIITEvZFnoJTm733ZW9iP4qrvRK1OOd0gDHI5LLvjlxBrz2nXvEDi5mDFjGpQ7S-NT_TSbgD4we0x52c-EQWmZP8OHm8XGc77WZhpGtnriyC518aTzzT2O_xSIqeZeCiUPN11ECHbdfu6UORZ5g6wp1thy4K89YcYjCzRdd3T34lpDTJJ99w4lq3xhLMKP_CC-8v3249SwsHgJNA.bexFT88cDU3xjuJKV7aKb9LHY8FP5sNVbwBPYlO4iqw&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=the+jews+and+the+left&amp;qid=1779105722&amp;sprefix=%2Caps%2C98&amp;sr=8-1">my new book</a>, The Jews and the Left. Even the worst episodes of antisemitism in America were often mitigated by an outpouring of love for Jews from their Christian neighbors. In the weeks before Leo Frank was lynched, hundreds of thousands of letters poured in from across the nation begging the judge for leniency and deploring the conditions of his trial. Henry Ford had to apologize for his antisemitic publication, The Dearborn Independent, when he wanted to run for office, because it was well known that you couldn’t go full antisemite and expect to succeed politically in America. (When Ford’s candidacy failed, he went right back to publishing it.) And when the Klan came for the Jews, the South turned on the Klan.
This is one of the lost pieces of Jewish American history that most surprised me when I first read about it while researching my book. On at least three occasions, the firebombing of synagogues across the South so shocked and angered white Southerners that it resulted in a more general shift in favor of the Civil Rights Movement.
Rabbi Perry Nussbaum of Jackson, Mississippi, was active in the Civil Rights Movement. He would visit the Freedom Riders in prison (he was astonished to find the prisons filled with Jews), and he almost died for his activism, twice: once when the Klan firebombed his synagogue and later when they firebombed his home in the late 1960s.
But the horrific violence against one of their Jewish neighbors, and a Jewish member of the clergy at that, had an interesting impact on white Mississippians: it backfired on the Klan, bringing out deeply protective emotions from the white community — so much so that it affected how they viewed the Civil Rights Movement in the name of which Rabbi Nussbaum was attacked.
After the synagogue bombing, a local paper printed a column attacking the “coward who had terrorized blacks and finally resorted to violence against Jews.” “This is Mississippi and we’ve had enough,” read the Clarion-Ledger. “We’ll get you and all the rest of your gutless friends.”
Mississippi’s Christian clergy, who hadn’t had much to say while blacks were terrorized, came out to express outrage — even guilt. “We are guilty of having allowed a climate to be created about us which lends itself to the propagation of prejudice,” read an editorial in the Methodist Advocate. “We have been silent in the face of obvious injustice and murderers walk the streets of our state because no jury had the courage to convict them. We have been afraid to get involved in anything that might be the least bit disturbing to the established power structure. Just as long as good men of all faiths remain silent and inert, so long will this violence continue. Just as long as one house of worship is unsafe, so long will all houses of worship be the next target.”
Four days after Rabbi Nussbaum’s home was bombed, the Jackson Clergy Alliance held a bi-racial “walk of penance.” It took courage: out of fear of violent opposition, they ensured they had armed police escorts to accompany their march. But in the end, they didn’t need them. Jackson had closed ranks around its Jews.
And then, an amazing thing happened: on October 20, exactly one month after the synagogue bombing, a Mississippi jury found members of the Klan guilty for the first time — convicting them for crimes against two Jewish activists, Andy Goodman and Mickey Schwerner, and black activist James Chaney. The three had been lynched by the Klan for registering black Americans to vote in 1964.
It was evidence of how deeply impacted the community had been by the violence against their Jewish neighbors.
But this was not the only time this happened. In 1958, the Atlanta synagogue was firebombed by the Klan, shocking the entire city, which always thought of itself as superior to the terrorism of white supremacists. The antisemitic Nazis who bombed the synagogue miscalculated. “They misread the attitudes of the community in which they lived,” Rabbi Jacob M. Rothschild of Atlanta later explained in an interview that was part of a collection of interviews with Southern rabbis that was later compiled into the book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Stand-Aside-Alone-Southern-Movement/dp/0817359095/ref=sr_1_1?crid=I2WQ2SNP8OSN&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.gmhbOu5QD0dKfq-MtB4FSA.55nkd-rn0buMjYQGK8QyaEElH7lTtC3ipZtIzpd6zUs&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=To+Stand+Aside+or+Stand+Alone%3A+Southern+Reform+Rabbis+in+the+Civil+Rights+Movement&amp;nsdOptOutParam=true&amp;qid=1779106770&amp;sprefix=to+stand+aside+or+stand+alone+southern+reform+rabbis+in+the+civil+rights+movement%2Caps%2C116&amp;sr=8-1">To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis in the Civil Rights Movement</a>:
<blockquote>
Because the bombing of the temple created a reaction, a response of such horror, of such outrage, that it backfired, and as a result of the bombing of the temple, it now, for perhaps the first time in Atlanta, became possible to speak out. I’m firmly convinced that it was this episode that prevented Atlanta from becoming the same kind of closed society that Birmingham became or Mississippi became … the mayor, the very morning of the bombing, said over TV, “This is the harvest reaped by our politicians and elected officials who have encouraged this kind of action.” Now once you say this then you make it possible for anyone to speak. So the bombing really was quite valuable in the ongoing story of Atlanta and the whole civil rights movement.
</blockquote>
It’s one of the most remarkable untold aspects of American history: The horror that Southern Christians felt at acts of antisemitism done in their name opened the doorway for the integration of black Americans.
So beloved were Jews in their communities that when the Klan came for the Jews, the South turned on the Klan.
Rabbi William B. Silverman of Nashville was another example. For preaching the value of equality before the law from the pulpit, he was beaten up by five men in a Methodist church in April of 1957 after giving a speech. He got calls to the house threatening his children: “We are not going to kill them; we are going to mutilate them. To show people what happens to the kids of a n****-loving rabbi.” But Rabbi Silverman refused to cave. Instead of keeping his kids home from school, he bought a gun. He went on television with his .38 and pulled it out and said, “I couldn’t kill a bird, but I’m going to take my boys to school. I will shoot first and ask questions later.”
His neighbors started calling him the Pistol-Packing Rabbi, and he became something of a cause célèbre in the community. His white Christian neighbors rallied to his defense against those who would dare threaten a rabbi. When white supremacists threatened to firebomb the Jewish community center, the board of trustees asked the rabbi to call off services. Still, he refused, and amid a heavy police presence, the community — Jewish and not — filled the pews.
The Klan painted swastikas all over the synagogue, his car, and his house. And in 1958, they made good on their threats and firebombed the Jewish community center. It proved a pivotal moment — not for the Jewish community but for their Christian neighbors.
“What I think the bombing did was that it compelled people to choose sides,” Rabbi Silverman later said. “Before it was just a matter of, ‘Oh, let’s be quiet and let’s not have any outsiders tell us what to do. We can handle our own problems.’ And, ‘Let’s scuttle into caves of silence and be quiet and everything will pass over and be forgotten.’ But they soon saw that it wasn’t going to pass over and the people had to take action, and I was surprised by the number of people that I never felt would take action who did.”
There was indignation and rage, and it went beyond the Jewish community; the integration of the schools went much more smoothly after the Jewish Community Center was bombed.
Contrary to the narrative we’re always told, Jews were not seen as an oppressed minority in America, and what antisemitism existed was by and large relegated to the elites. One sociologist studying the U.S. between 1939 and 1962 found that Southern whites were the least antisemitic of all Americans. Jews weren’t seen as a minority ethnic group but rather one-third of a community of “three great faiths,” and their clergy were afforded a deep respect. From 1945 to 1970, there were at least 27 Jewish mayors across the South, 38 Jewish state legislators, and 66 Jewish city councilmen.
The Southern rabbis invoked the Bible to insist on the compact the United States had made with its citizens in the name of God, and in so doing, they were reprising the role Jews had played for the Founding Fathers — as founding partners in the creation of this great nation.
Fast forward to today: can you even imagine a group of Democrats organizing a “March of Penance” to stand by Jews and apologize for the way their cowardice enabled the violence, harassment, and murder of Jews last year?
***
This is republished by permission from the author from her newsletter.
Batya Ungar-Sargon is a NewsNation weekend anchor and the author of the book &#8220;The Jews and the Left&#8221; from Harper Collins. Subscribe to her daily newsletter at <a href="http://batya-us.com/">batya-us.com</a>.

Protest To Berlin Philharmonic

When The Klan Came For The Jews, The South Turned On The Klan

antisemitism

Editor’s note: This is the first in a four-part weekend series on the hunt for the Bismarck, coming up on its 85th anniversary this month. 
On Valentine’s Day 1939, Adolf Hitler visited Hamburg’s Blohm &amp; Voss shipyard. He was there to preside over the christening of Germany’s newest battleship. Dorothee von Löwenfeld, granddaughter of Otto von Bismarck, the father of the modern German superstate, broke a champagne bottle over the bow while movie cameras rolled and flashbulbs popped. To the cheers of 60,000 spectators, the hull of the mighty vessel, named in honor of her illustrious grandfather, slid into the launch basin while bands played martial hymns. After a speech exhorting Bismarck’s crew to prove themselves worthy to serve on the namesake of the “Iron Chancellor,” Hitler departed, confident that Germany’s resurgence as a sea power had moved another step closer to addressing the imbalance between the Kriegsmarine and its future adversary, Great Britain’s Royal Navy.
Bismarck was a leviathan. 823 feet long and 118 feet wide at the beam, she had truly gorgeous lines. The newsreels announced that Germany’s newest battleship displaced 35,000 tons, which was the treaty limit. But with war clouds rumbling, Hitler had no interest in honoring mere parchment. When fully loaded, Bismarck would actually displace just shy of 51,000 tons. And she bristled with awesome firepower. Four turrets, two fore and two aft, housed eight 15-inch main guns in twin batteries that could hurl a 1,800-pound shell over 20 miles. These monster weapons were complemented by 12 5.9-inch secondary guns and an array of small-caliber anti-aircraft batteries.
It was still a time when battleships were considered the apex predators of any fleet. And Bismarck was the very embodiment of naval power. Yet as impressive as she was, Bismarck was among only a handful of warships Germany had produced since ignominiously surrendering the High Seas Fleet in 1918 as a condition of the Armistice that ended the First World War. Before then, Germany and Great Britain had been at rough naval parity — their largest sea battle, Jutland in 1916, was a tactical draw. But now, for every ship Hitler could send out to sea, the British could counter with 10. The Führer had assured his navy that he would not go to war before 1945, giving them ample time to close the tonnage gap. The Kriegsmarine head, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, believed that to fight sooner would spell disaster for the fleet, stating, “The best they could hope to demonstrate was their ability to die gallantly.”
And yet, when in May 1941 a commissioned, manned, and loaded Bismarck set out on her first sortie, war had already been raging for almost two years. Raeder understood the Kriegsmarine could not fight the much larger Royal Navy head-to-head. Rather, they would engage in commerce warfare — attack the cargo convoys steaming from North America to Britain, upon which the latter depended for its very survival. Bismarck’s mission, called Operation Rheinübung (“Exercise Rhine”), was to break out into the Atlantic where she could disappear into the vastness of the open ocean.
Once on the prowl, such a dangerous weapon could wreak havoc on merchant shipping and sever Britain’s supply lifeline, starving the island nation into submission. Indeed, four smaller surface raiders — Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Hipper, and Scheer — had already sent 50 merchant ships to the bottom. The British Admiralty, and especially Winston Churchill, who always feared strangulation before invasion, understood the danger. Bismarck had to be stopped.
On May 18, 1941, Bismarck, along with the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, set sail from then-Gotenhafen and made her way to a Norwegian fjord near Bergen. Bismarck was under the command of Captain Ernst Lindemann, a capable seaman respected by his 2,283-man crew. But he shared the bridge with the overall operation commander, Admiral Günther Lütjens, and was compelled to defer to his authority. Unlike Lindemann, Lütjens was unpopular with the men, who found him dour, fatalistic, even something of a Jonah. Nevertheless, the admiral would do his best to slip into the North Sea and head for the hunting grounds of the Atlantic.
Aware that if word got to the British that he was aiming for the open ocean they would try to intercept him, Lütjens had hoped to make the passage through the narrow Scandinavian waters in secret. But Norwegian resistance, as well as a Swedish vessel, alerted British intelligence that the mightiest battleship in service was on the move. On May 21, an overflying Spitfire reconnaissance fighter photographed the two warships while briefly at anchor in the fjord. During the pause, Prinz Eugen took the opportunity to top off her fuel, but Lütjens failed to do the same with Bismarck. Unaware they’d been spotted, the warships weighed anchor on May 22 and made for the Atlantic.
It was only after the ships were underway that the German naval high command informed the Führer of the operation. Raeder feared he might get cold feet at the prospect of risking such an expensive and prestigious weapon. Hitler was already wary of the Kriegsmarine. Not only did the former infantryman have little interest in naval warfare, but it was also the least Nazified of the armed services — they eschewed the Nazi salute and even kept on Jewish officers. After a contentious discussion, Hitler grudgingly approved the mission post facto, adding, “I have a bad feeling about this.”
At the same time, Bismarck entered the Norwegian Sea, Admiral John Tovey aboard the battleship HMS King George V at Scapa Flow — the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet base in northern Scotland — was working to coordinate an intercept once reconnaissance revealed Bismarck’s movements. But what passage into the ocean would she choose? Lütjens had several paths available to him to break into the open sea. The route he chose was the Denmark Strait, between Iceland and Greenland. Though narrow, it offered a direct route to the shipping lanes and was often covered in heavy fog. For nearly two days, Bismarck and Prinz Eugen steamed towards the strait, cloaked in a thick haze. But by late Friday afternoon, May 23, the skies cleared, revealing the stunning iron-green expanse of the Arctic waters.
The cruiser HMS Suffolk was patrolling the Denmark Strait searching for the Germans. Due to ice flows and mines, the navigable section she crisscrossed was just 40 miles wide. At 7:22 p.m. on May 23, the two German vessels appeared on Suffolk’s radar and then suddenly emerged out of the mist on a horizon still under sunlight at these latitudes. Suffolk’s lookouts reported: ONE BATTLESHIP ONE CRUISER IN SIGHT. The British warship slipped into a fog bank before Bismarck could fire.
Fifteen miles away, another cruiser, Norfolk, raced in to help track her. But Norfolk charged out of the mist just six miles from Bismarck, dangerously close. As the cruiser turned hard over to get away, the German battleship rotated her turrets, the barrels fingered skyward, and for the first time she fired her main guns in anger. The shells screamed overhead until huge geysers erupted around the fleeing British warship. Norfolk took splinters from a near-miss, but she survived. Both cruisers then maneuvered out of gun range to get behind and track the two German ships, doggedly staying with them through heavy seas and frigid spray despite their targets’ attempts to shake them.
The cruisers’ job was not to engage the larger enemy vessels but to stay with the Germans like terriers and track them by radar until the larger capital ships arrived. Two powerful British warships with escorting destroyers were, in fact, racing towards the Denmark Strait to plug the gap while Tovey gathered his scattered assets. One was the newest battleship in the fleet, Prince of Wales. The other was the pride of the Royal Navy, the battlecruiser Hood. After steaming through the night, the British warships were approaching Bismarck from the southeast. It was 5:25 a.m. on May 24 when they spotted the ominous silhouettes of the German vessels as dots making smoke on the horizon.
On board the trailing destroyer Electra, confidence abounded. Contemplating Hood’s enormous yet graceful lines off the quarter, one sailor predicted: “Jerry’s going to have a bit of a shock when he sees her ahead of him!”
He wasn’t wrong. At the same time, on Bismarck, Lieutenant Commander Conrad von Müllenheim-Rechberg recalled the nervous anxiety throughout the crew when at 5:30 a.m. an enemy ship appeared: “At first, we didn’t know who’d come out. Was it a cruiser? Then it got bigger and bigger coming over the horizon. And the second gunnery officer with his powerful binoculars said, ‘Oh no! It’s the Hood! The Hood!’ The terror of our wargames.” Down in Bismarck’s boiler room teenaged Fireman 3rd Class Johannes Zimmerman was told to prepare to engage the Hood, and he thought, “What, are they crazy? They’re going to hold a wargame now?”
But this was no game. As the two flotillas closed the range, one of the most dramatic and tragic naval engagements in history was about to begin.  
***
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities fund manager, author, and columnist whose articles have appeared on the pages of The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, NY Daily News, The Daily Wire, National Review, The Hill, The Federalist, Zerohedge, and other outlets. He is the author of three <a href="https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07MQJBJSD?ccs_id=55112527-86f6-4c89-b82e-a96d6869abed">books</a>. You can also follow him on <a href="https://bradschaeffer.substack.com/">Substack</a> and <a href="https://x.com/BSchaefferNJ">X</a>. His latest book, “A War For Half The World: Why the Real Battle for the Future was Fought in the Pacific,” will be released in February 2027.

Adolf Hitler with captain Lindemann behind him admiral Gunther Lutjens and general Wilhelm Keitel aboard battleship Bismarck may 5, 1941 one hour before his last departure at the time of the Battle of the Atlantic (it was destroyed may 25, 1941 by the All

The Rise And Fall Of The German Battleship Bismarck, Part I

Bismark

WWII

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is many things: a radical progressive, a viable presidential candidate, a former bartender, and apparently, America’s foremost revisionist historian. Last week she graced the country with a bombshell revelation, informing us all that it was black Americans who created democracy:
<blockquote>I think about the Civil Rights and voting rights movement, and how black Americans really created democracy in this country… black Americans created democracy. They built something from nothing. </blockquote>
I had no idea. I was under the naive impression that it was the ancient Greeks and our Founding Fathers who conjured such a thing, but clearly I was the last to know. Even the podcast host, whom she was enlightening, nodded along in vigorous agreement: “Yes, YES.” Where have I been all these years?
There you have it, folks. The 1619 Project rides again. History has been rewritten, you’ve been lied to your entire life, and James Madison was apparently mixed. Unless, of course, AOC hit her head falling out of a coconut tree and is simply, resoundingly, and spectacularly wrong.
Let’s take a stroll down history lane.
Democracy literally comes from the ancient Greek word dēmokratia: “rule by the people,&#8221; from dēmos meaning &#8220;the people&#8221; or &#8220;citizen-body,&#8221; and kratos for &#8220;power&#8221; or &#8220;rule.” <a href="https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/gettysburg.htm">By the people, for the people</a>. Sound familiar? It describes a system in which citizens hold the power to make decisions, either directly or through their elected representatives. 
In 508-507 BC, the true “Father of Democracy,” Cleisthenes, shifted power away from hereditary elites and toward the demos. He reorganized citizens into tribes based on residence rather than bloodline, introduced equality under the law, and reformed governance through popular voting. Long after his death, the historian Thucydides praised the system: “Its administration favors the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy.”
Credit for the creation of democracy goes to white, ancient Greek aristocrats. My apologies, Congresswoman.
If AOC means American democracy specifically, she’s no less mistaken. American democracy wasn’t “built from nothing” by any single group or era. It was deliberately engineered as a constitutional republic with robust democratic features during the late 18th century. Drawing on ancient Athens and Rome, English common law, and Enlightenment thinkers including John Locke, Montesquieu, and Blackstone, our Founders designed a republic specifically intended to avoid the pitfalls of pure direct democracy. As Madison argued in <a href="https://billofrightsinstitute.org/primary-sources/federalist-no-10/">Federalist No. 10</a>, this often resulted in mob rule and instability.
In its place, they built representative government, separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism, all to protect individual liberty.
This architecture did not spring up overnight. In 1620, the Mayflower Compact established a framework in which settlers agreed to &#8220;combine ourselves together into a civil body politic&#8221; and make &#8220;just and equal laws&#8221; by majority consent, planting the seed of consensual self-governance on American soil. Over a century later, on July 4th, 1776, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” endowed with unalienable rights from God, not government, and that we have the right to rule ourselves. This culmination came at what historians have rightly called the <a href="https://www.constitutionfacts.com/us-constitution-amendments/the-constitutional-convention/">“Miracle at Philadelphia,”</a> where 55 delegates, including Madison and Washington, met in secret at the Pennsylvania State House and hammered out the most consequential governing document in human history. Popular sovereignty, elected representatives, separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism all took final form under the tutelage of the evil, non-pigmented caucasian.
Just as it would be inaccurate to say women alone created American democracy, it is equally inaccurate to say black Americans did because it is simply not true. Unless Washington and the Founders were applying considerably more face powder than the portraits suggest.
I was reminded of all this just last night at an Independent Women’s event, where extraordinary women gathered to celebrate and defend exactly this history. That’s the spirit we need more of: women, Americans of all backgrounds, who know what this country is built on and aren’t afraid to say so. We should be teaching this, not erasing it.
To be uncharacteristically charitable to AOC, one could argue that she means that black Americans, through the crucible of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement, helped make the promise of democracy real rather than merely rhetorical. Indeed, black Americans&#8217; contributions to expanding rights were immense and undeniable, but &#8220;expanding and perfecting democracy&#8221; is a very different claim from &#8220;creating it from nothing,&#8221; and conflating the two isn&#8217;t empowerment, it’s historical erasure. This revisionist framing flattens a complex, centuries-long story into a single-group morality tale, where one group’s activism gets sole credit for everything good.
Meanwhile, that very democracy she claims was created by black Americans is being thwarted by her and her fellow Democrats in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama wants to strip away the voting rights of Republicans of all color, and they’ve promised that when they regain power, they will pack the Supreme Court, enable mass mail-in-ballots, throw away voter ID, and nuke the filibuster to add four more blue senate seats. 
These are not the actions of people who revere democratic institutions. They’re the actions of people who revere power.
The danger of letting the Left rewrite history and promote fallacious ideas is not abstract. When young people and useful idiots are taught a distorted version of the past by a backward education system and p(regressive) leadership, they have no framework to defend what is true. That’s been the design. Gutting civics and history education was not an accident; it was a strategy.
Our Founders studied history with rigor, absorbed its lessons, and built something incredible and new: a durable, liberty-focused republic that has endured for nearly 250 years. Its genius lay not in perfection but in self-correction through elections, courts, and amendments, not reinvention.
Don’t fall for the lies: communism has failed everywhere it has been tried, Capitalism harnesses human self-interest to drive innovation, growth, and prosperity like no other, and our constitutional republic is a miraculous achievement, conceived by a very pale founding bunch and hardened over generations by Americans of different color and circumstance, bound under one creed.
That’s not an uncomfortable fact; that’s a beautiful one, and as we approach our 250th birthday, it is one worth defending clearly and without apology.
So thank you, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for yet another opportunity to do exactly that.

Democratic National Convention (DNC) 2024 – Day One

AOC Flunks American History

1619 Project

When historians look back on this period of war in Ukraine and Iran, they will be deeply puzzled by a simple question: why can’t the leaders of the Western Democracies hear our enemies?
There were two examples last week, one from Russia and one from Iran, in which our enemies were extraordinarily clear about their view of things.
In both cases, our enemies’ comments were dramatically different from what we have been telling ourselves.
We keep hoping for reasonableness, for negotiating to a peaceful conclusion, for finding some common ground to build a better future.
Our enemies share none of those goals, and they are very clear about their goals and how different they are from the West’s self-delusion.
Consider first the Russian position.
While Putin was having a very nice chat with President Donald Trump for over an hour, his senior national security spokesperson was preparing a radically different message.
Dmitry Medvedev has been president, prime minister, and now deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia. He would never make an aggressive, hostile speech without Putin’s approval.
Yet the day after Putin’s call with President Trump, Medvedev gave a speech in which he declared that the United States is Russia’s geopolitical rival and that the conflict with the West is “a question of existence” that will last longer than this generation. He rejected any American mediation between Russia and Ukraine and asserted that victory over Ukraine would solve a lot of Russia’s problems.
Medvedev’s speech was a pretty clear statement of long-term conflict. Remember that Putin, in his April 2005 State of the Nation address, said he believed the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
Why would we expect a former KGB Colonel who is a fervent Russian nationalist and who wants to reassemble a very strong Russian state to settle for the survival of a Ukraine he is determined to conquer?
While the Russians were telling us we were in a very long conflict that would last over a generation, the Iranians were sending us a clear, unambiguous statement about their intentions.
As the Institute for the Study of War reported:
<blockquote>
Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei declared on April 30 that Iran will retain control over shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and maintain its nuclear and missile capabilities, which supports ISW-CTP’s assessment that the Iranian regime is unlikely to make meaningful concessions in its next proposal to the United States … Mojtaba also underscored that Iran will defend its nuclear, missile, and advanced technological capabilities as resolutely as it defends its territorial borders. A senior Iranian official speaking to the Washington Post on April 30 similarly asserted that Iran’s security establishment rejects compromise on key matters, such as Iran’s ability to enrich uranium.
</blockquote>
It seems clear that Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Commander Major General Ahmad Vahidi now dominates the Iranian dictatorship and represents the hardline position that Iran can withstand American and Israeli attacks and ultimately win the war simply by not giving in.
Western analysts, including those who dominate Washington, D.C., simply cannot break out of their rational, Enlightenment model of reasonableness to understand how unreasonable alternative systems can be, and yet, within their own values and their own experiences, they are following a logic train that is easily understandable.
This was the key problem Winston Churchill faced after reading “Mein Kampf” in the early 1930s and understanding the logic of Hitler’s insanity. He simply could not get the British establishment to listen to Hitler and rearm accordingly.
Consider first the belief system and history that shape General Vahidi. He is part of a religious dictatorship that has been chanting “Death to America” for 47 years. General Vahidi was born in 1958 and joined the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in 1979 at the age of 21. He is sanctioned by the United States, Canada, and the European Union for terrorism and nuclear activities.
When we think about the pain our bombing campaign is causing the Iranian government, we have to put it in the context of their experience of the war with Iraq from September 1980 to August 1988. This was a brutal meat grinder in which the Iraqis used chemical weapons. The best estimate is that Iranian casualties were over 1,000,000, with the Iranian death toll somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000.
If you consider that General Vahidi’s experience from the age of 22 to 30 was this brutal war, and since then he has waged terrorist campaigns against the West while focusing on building nuclear weapons and missiles that can reach Europe and the United States, you get a different sense of what we are up against.
If the religiously inspired (and this is the vital fact which the rational West refuses to consider) dictatorship, when it was barely established, could endure an eight-year war with a million casualties, what is the historic yardstick by which we should expect them to accept terms they would regard as a betrayal of the revolution?
This question of pain levels also applies to Putin and the Russian dictatorship. The Soviet Union lost over 20 million dead in World War II. At Stalingrad alone, they lost 40,000 civilians and had about 1,100,000 soldiers killed or wounded.
From a Ukrainian perspective, the horror of the Stalin-enforced famine of 1932 and 1933, which killed 3,900,000 (about 13% of the population) through starvation, is a horrifying reminder of why they fight against Moscow so intensely and at such costs. The Ukrainian word for the famine is Holodomor, which combines the Ukrainian words for starvation and to inflict death. It is reasonable to suggest that the Ukrainians will fight to the end rather than accept subjugation to a city that deliberately starved millions of them to death.
Our enemies are trying to tell us who they really are. Future historians will puzzle at our inability to hear them.
The Chinese and North Korean dictatorships are watching carefully our inability to confront and respond to reality. They will develop their own strategies accordingly, and both will help Russia and Iran survive the inadequate efforts of the United States and its allies.
Literally, the future of the world will be decided by the American ability or inability to learn and change when faced with aggressive evil.
If we do not change and recognize that our enemies are enemies who think differently from us, we will lose. It is that simple.
***
Newt Gingrich was the Republican Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999. Follow him on X @NewtGingrich. Join his newsletter at <a href="https://www.gingrich360.net/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.gingrich360.net/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1778011290065000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1zn9zi0baZTNq2_7KeHn-r">Gingrich360.net</a>.

IRAN-POLITICS-US-HOSTAGE-ANNIVERSARY

Newt Gingrich: Why Can’t We Hear Our Enemies?

Foreign Policy

Iran war

Ukraine-Russia War

As America approaches its 250th birthday, one might expect to see a nation eager to celebrate its inheritance. Instead, American pride has fallen to new lows, and the reason runs deeper than politics. A cultural phenomenon has taken hold within our institutions, eroding national pride at its root.
The problem comes down to a matter of loyalty versus hatred for one’s country.
Both phenomena have a name. The former is patriotism, expressed by a love of home, a national attachment shaped by loyalty to the values and goals of a country.
The latter is seldom identified, but the great British conservative thinker Sir Roger Scruton gave it a name: Oikophobia.
Sir Roger defined it as “the repudiation of inheritance and home.” The Greek root oikos denotes a dwelling place or a home in the fullest sense, which encompasses one’s home country and its inheritance: its history, culture, beliefs, and institutions.
And today, there is a tangible rise of oikophobia.
<div id="attachment_1087107" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1087107" class="size-large wp-image-1087107" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-589704846-864x576.jpg" alt="EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND - AUGUST 15: Roger Scruton attends the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 15, 2016 in Edinburgh, Scotland. The Edinburgh International Book Festival is one of the most important annual literary events, and takes place in the city which became a UNESCO City of Literature in 2004. (Photo by Awakening/Getty Images)" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-589704846-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-589704846-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-589704846-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-589704846.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Awakening/Getty Images</div>
A <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/692150/american-pride-slips-new-low.aspx">2025 Gallup poll</a> asked adults, “How proud are you to be an American — extremely proud, very proud, moderately proud, only a little proud or not at all proud?”
In 2001, 87% answered extremely or very proud. Today, that has fallen by a third to a disheartening 58%.
The remaining 40% certainly fall short of patriotism — 9% claimed they were not at all proud to be American, 11% attested to be only a little proud, and 19% were moderately proud. Nothing to boast about, for this is the grip of oikophobia. And it is exacerbated in certain groups.
Pride in America varies vastly between political parties, pointing to perhaps the root of the problem. Among Republicans, 92% were extremely or very proud to be American, and the figure for independents was 53%. But among Democrats, the rate plummets to 36%.
These numbers reflect a curious trend. For Democrats, their pride seems to fluctuate with current events and politics: President Trump in office, George Floyd’s death, January 6 — the list goes on.
Conservatives, on the other hand, appear to derive their pride from America’s history, its traditions, and its achievements — the unshaking character of our nation.
This is the difference between oikophobia and patriotism.
However, it is important to understand that oikophobia is not just a lack of pride or the expression of criticism. In fact, a healthy nation ought to reflect on its past and seek improvement. Oikophobia, by contrast, rejects national inheritance. It reframes history as something to be dismantled rather than understood.
Since the oikophobe — better, the oik — is so consumed by repudiation, one might expect him to simply leave the home he so thoroughly disdains.
Oddly, they instead choose to rule it. And they can be found across the most critical cultural institutions — museums, academia, and media, to name a few.
But these oiks are not working for the sake of public benefit, mind you. They infiltrate the public sphere and act as operatives of the Culture Wars, bending, or rather reframing, American history to their will: to paint America as systemically racist, oppressive, and cruel, all in order to tell what can only be described, in Scruton’s own words, as “a tale of shame and degradation.”
This tale is told in different ways depending on the institution.
Take first the Smithsonian — the home of America’s national museums that attract visitors from all over the country. As an institution that is nearly two-thirds publicly funded, it bears a responsibility to American taxpayers.
Yet it fails in nearly every way. The National Museum of American History, for instance, cannot even deliver an objective narrative of American history. Instead, it indoctrinates visitors with left-wing ideology and sows shame among Americans, all in an attempt to make them reject their national identity. It treats slavery, imperialism, political polarization, and identity politics as the defining characteristics of the United States.
<div id="attachment_936715" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-936715" class="size-large wp-image-936715" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/06/GettyImages-2217701221-864x576.jpg" alt="WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 29: A view of the Smithsonian Institution near the National Mall on May 29, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images)" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/06/GettyImages-2217701221-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/06/GettyImages-2217701221-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/06/GettyImages-2217701221-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/06/GettyImages-2217701221.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Roy Rochlin/Getty Images</div>
Undeniably, these are elements of our history, some more important than others, but when elevated above all else, they cease to inform and instead distort the American narrative. 
And this is where oikophobia becomes most visible — through omission, interpretive framing, and moralizing language. What is emphasized, what is forgotten, and how the story is told is a much more insightful story. 
Institutions like the Smithsonian are respected worldwide, and for them to show such blatant disrespect to the very heritage it is meant to preserve is nothing short of disgusting.
Its leaders also make it abundantly clear that they are oiks themselves. 
Dr. Anthea Hartig, director of the National Museum of American History, never misses the chance to recite lines about how the Smithsonian Institution resides on the stolen land of native tribes or how her white privilege has afforded her her station in life. Both statements are meant to signal that the American story begins and remains in illegitimacy rather than achievement.
Nothing is further from the truth.
Like museums, academia too has been affected. Critical race theory tells young, impressionable students that institutions are not to be trusted, for they are inherently racist. Campuses not only allow but even enable protesters who threaten Jewish students and faculty, harass law enforcement, camp out on shared student grounds, and chant violently, anti-American sentiments. Conservative students self-censor so as not to be canceled. 
The media is not free either. An excellent example of this is the ongoing conflict in Iran. Just a few weeks ago, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth called out the press for its lack of discipline and honesty, for its habitual practice of sowing shame and fear.
Referencing Operation Epic Fury, Hegseth asks why no one has run a story on the bravery and tenacity of American soldiers. Not MSNBC. Not CNN. Not even Newsmax.
Hegseth shamed the press corps for being irresponsible and for “undermining the success” of the American military. “How about we talk about how special America is,” he said, “that only we have these capabilities.” And then he even conceded, “I think it’s too much to ask.”
<div id="attachment_1074159" style="width: 875px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1074159" class="size-large wp-image-1074159" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-2269789867-865x576.jpg" alt="US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth speaks during a press briefing at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, on April 8, 2026. The United States and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire on April 7 barely an hour before President Donald Trump's deadline to obliterate the country, triggering global relief alongside apprehension. Tehran has agreed to temporarily reopen the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world's oil, gas and fertiliser passes, easing concerns for the battered global economy." width="865" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-2269789867-865x576.jpg 865w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-2269789867-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-2269789867-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-2269789867.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 865px) 100vw, 865px" />Credit: Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images.</div>
Unfortunately, he may be right. This is yet another example of the ways in which oikophobia now permeates the most influential institutions, degrading national unity by diffusing doubt.
In the 2004 essay <a href="https://www.civitas.org.uk/content/files/NeedForNations2020.pdf">The Need for Nations</a>, in which he coined the term oikophobia, Scruton quotes Goethe’s Faust, “What you have inherited from your forefathers, earn it, that you might own it.”
Though he was writing about Europe of the early 2000s, Scruton’s analysis applies almost perfectly to contemporary America. He says that we must “earn again the sovereignty that previous generations so laboriously shaped from the inheritance of Christianity, imperial government and Roman law. Earning it, we will own it, and owning it, we will be at peace within our borders.”
The trouble with oikophobia is that it makes such ownership impossible. It breeds a class of followers who, set in their ways to redefine the nation according to their disdain for it, feel entitled to reject the very inheritance of their birthright. Thus, they will never earn it. And they will never own it.
Where gratitude should exist toward our forefathers, oiks replace with grievance. They say that America is not a nation striving toward its ideals, but one defined solely by its failures. And when that story is perpetuated through museums, classrooms, and the media — the very venues tasked with shaping national attachment — it does not remain abstract. It becomes formative. It becomes defining. It reshapes how Americans see their country, and ultimately, whether they believe it is worth loving at all.
This is the cost of the rise of oikophobia — a battle to define what it means to be American.
But the answer is simple: our American inheritance is worth conserving.
* * *
Anna Gustafson is a Research Assistant in the Allison Center for National Security at The Heritage Foundation. 
Savanna Donaldson is a former member of Heritage’s Young Leaders Program.

Roger Scruton Portrait Session

Roger Scruton Was Right About The War On Patriotism

Heritage Foundation

Legacy Media

Smithsonian Museum

If you thought America’s love of Japan was only about Hibachi restaurants, Anime teens, and The Karate Kid reboots, you haven’t spent enough time on X. Last weekend, the admiration entered a new phase as the social media platform boosted an AI-enabled translation tool, making exchanging and sharing posts easier between Japanese and American users.
What resulted was a pleasant and outright wholesome font of positive vibes that seemed out of place in the notoriously cynical virtual world of hot takes, hate bots, and culture wars. The website Pirate Wires noticed and published an <a href="https://www.piratewires.com/p/japan-is-americas-greatest-ally-and">essay</a> doubling down on the niche community, heaping praise on the newfound old love between Japan and America. In it, the authors point to President Trump’s bromance with the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, love of American BBQ, and shared technological and military goals, all of which are true and good, but that’s only part of the story.
While it appears the Japanese people are living their best lives cosplaying Americana at <a href="https://tasteofcountry.com/authentic-honky-tonk-bar-tokyo-japan/">Honky Tonk bars</a> and showing off their <a href="https://www.topspeed.com/japans-love-affair-with-american-muscle-cars/">classic cruisers</a>, the Pirate Wires take is a little deceiving. What’s missing is the 1980s working-class anxiety and animosity toward our now Eastern besties — a sentiment not felt since the Greatest Generation came back from raising the flag on Mt. Suribachi and refused to buy Toyotas.
Japan’s rapid post-WWII industrialization and investment in technology paid off economically and sparked a transpacific rivalry, trade war, and manufacturing insecurity on par with a Rocky-versus-Drago fight of the century, if not a little less…violent. The Cold War rightly absorbs much of the attention when recalling the era, but as the Soviet Union was showing signs of losing its grip, Japan was becoming a real threat to the United States’ industrial domination — and the repercussions were being felt in homes, boardrooms, and factories across the country. Toyota and Honda exploded onto the automotive scene, helping usher in Detroit’s demise. Japanese technology, such as portable radios, video games, and televisions, was grabbing more market share from American companies like RCA. Even America’s trophy landmarks were being taken over. In 1989, Mitsubishi Estate took control of Rockefeller Center, a capstone acquisition following the Japanese corporation&#8217;s acquisitions of Firestone Tire &amp; Rubber and Columbia Pictures.
This tension was reflected in pop culture entertainment — think Ron Howard’s 1986 film Gung Ho, where Michael Keaton plays a foreman at an American auto manufacturing plant taken over by a Japanese corporation. The film is a comedy, but it mirrors the zeitgeist of the time. There was also Rising Sun, Kinjite, and imagined futures that look strikingly Japanese, such as Blade Runner and Robocop 3; Die Hard takes place in Nakatomi Plaza. Tom Clancy even explores this theme in his novel &#8220;Debt of Honor,&#8221; in which the protagonist, Jack Ryan, fights a &#8220;secret cabal of Japanese industrialists.&#8221;
But enough with nuance. The biggest takeaway from the situation is the display of understated power and the magnitude of influence and reach American culture has had from the mid-20th century forward. And even though there have been some notable outside foreign influences permeating these liberty-laden shores, it’s far from an even exchange.
We gave the world jazz and rock and roll, fast food and blue jeans, baseball and John Wayne Westerns. Sure, we got the British Invasion and Crocodile Dundee, but what would France do without Jerry Lewis and Germany without David Hasselhoff? I’m only half-kidding. American cultural influence was instrumental in winning the Cold War — there was even an underground pipeline of Chuck Norris <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2442080/">films</a> to undermine the communists — and who could deny Roger Goodell’s not-so-secret <a href="https://media.nfl.com/news-and-releases/international/nfl-s-global-markets-program-expands-in-2026-with-addition-of-it">plan</a> for the NFL to take over the world?
So while our “special” relationship with Japan is great, it’s not exactly novel. America’s cultural influence is a force for good in the world, and it’s a shame the mainstream media has ignored it in favor of authoritarian worship, evidenced by the rise of <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/25/asia/chinamaxxing-americans-soft-power-intl-hnk-dst">stories</a> about “Chinamaxxing.”
Good for Pirate Wires to report a feel-good story that most of the media ignored, even if it wasn&#8217;t a complete picture. It’s important to remember that for all the reports of America’s demise, we’re still going strong — and in unexpected corners of the world and in unexpected ways. Far from the evil empire that snobby Europeans or elitist media personalities would have you believe, we just want to spread some good old-fashioned American fun. Because in the long run, that makes better friends than enemies.

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