Home of the brave

The World Cup is here, the whole world is watching, and what they’re seeing is blowing their minds.

David Volodzko using ChatGPT

People from all over the world have come to America for the World Cup this year, only to realize they’ve been lied to their entire lives. When Americans say ours is the greatest country on earth, we’re not chest-thumping. It’s not ultra-nationalism either. What our welcome visitors are rapidly discovering is that it just so happens to be true. Now millions of people, from Italy to Senegal, from Argentina to South Korea, are fast becoming American patriots. And it’s beautiful to watch.

You’ve probably seen the videos. The Italian man at a diner whose mind is blown when the waitress offers to refill his Coke. “I can refill this a thousand times!” he tells his friend. “And it’s free!” But you paid for it, his friend says. “Once!” Then he chugs the entire drink and orders another. There’s the British girl in the Smoky Mountains who says, “I understand now why they call it America the Beautiful.” In another, she says, “I’ve been to around 27 different countries in my whole life … I’ve been all over the world, basically. And nothing comes close to the U.S.A.”

Many of them came imagining a land of fast food and bland bar snacks, only to end up losing their minds when they realize America is the greatest foodie destination on the planet. Only Japan and Argentina produce beef as good as ours. Only Italy and Spain produce ham that can compare to Virginia’s, much less South Carolina pulled-pork BBQ. You like seafood? Maine lobster, Alaska king crab, Bristol Bay salmon, each is best-in-class. Washington apples, Michigan blueberries, Georgia peaches, Hawaiian pineapples, all the best. We also make some damn fine whiskey, wine, and beer.

Then there are the people swooning over cement mixers, school buses, thunderstorms, Waffle House, Taco Bell, ranch dressing, Walmart, and chicken parm (the “Deli Guy,” it turns out, is one of our greatest ambassadors). Others feel betrayed and lied to by the notion that America is just another country, like any other. The British influencer Adam in America recently commented, “The media portrays Americans as rude, lazy, all of the above—and it’s further from the truth. The amount of hospitality and kindness and care and pride Americans hold is truly like no other country I’ve been to.” This heartwarming phenomenon has a name too. They’re calling it the Big American Sleepover.

And these visitors are not wrong to be astonished. Driving across Texas takes longer than crossing most of Europe. We have the biggest trees on earth, the oldest trees on earth. We have the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Everglades, Big Sur, Niagara. If just one of these existed in another country, that alone would be reason to visit. The transistor, the internet, the polio vaccine given away for free, GPS given away for free, the moon landings. Jazz, blues, rock, Hollywood. The whole world grows up on American culture.

But the greatest thing about America is its people. Black Americans who built so much of this country under conditions of profound injustice, and then produced the Civil Rights movement, one of humanity’s most morally significant achievements. Latino, Asian, Jewish, Irish, Italian, Arab, Haitian, Korean Americans. This country has taken people from every conflict in history and handed them the same passport. No civilization has ever attempted that at this scale and come this close to pulling it off. None.

So here is my question today. Why can’t our own children see it?

Why does it take a girl from Britain, standing in Yosemite with tears on her face, to see what a graduate of our finest universities has been trained not to see? Why do visitors from Senegal and South Korea feel a wonder that our own students would be embarrassed to express out loud? I’ll tell you why. Because somewhere in the last few decades, we stopped teaching our children that this country is worth loving and started teaching them a different lesson instead. We taught them, as Katharine Birbalsingh recently said in her brilliant speech, that the world divides into two camps: oppressors and oppressed. That every person, every institution, every nation must be sorted into one box or the other. And once you accept that framework, everything follows.

Charlie Kirk was a good man, but his murder becomes amusing. Henry Nowak was an innocent kid, but he can be left to bleed out. Karmelo Anthony must be innocent, and the celebration by so many black Americans is found to be reasonable. America, the most powerful nation on earth, goes in the oppressor box. And nothing in the oppressor box is to be loved. Not its founders, not its flag, not its birthday.

And let me be clear about who is responsible. We are. Our generation. We built the universities where this doctrine took hold. We paid the tuition. And at every turn, we chose cowardice over hard truths. We inherited an incredible moral bedrock from our parents and grandparents that included values such as duty, responsibility, and the knowing difference between right and wrong, then we spent it down like a trust fund without ever even glancing at the balance.

Worse, we stopped asking anyone to buy in. We welcomed millions and told them nothing about what this country asks of the people it receives, because we’d forgotten ourselves. We opened the borders to certain immigrants who do not all hold these values and convinced ourselves it’ll be fine, that they’ll assimilate and learn to get along, because they just want a better life, because that’s what we would do. But our nation doesn’t run the same when you try it with people who have completely different norms. We have been asleep. And now we are slowly waking up to what has been growing while we slept. And yes, it’s a rude awakening.

On our campuses, there are essentially no conservative universities at all, outside of a handful of religious and military institutions. American faculty today report self-censoring at higher rates than at the height of the McCarthy era. Yes, the McCarthy era, the very episode we teach as a cautionary tale. Well, now we live it, except what we live is a version on steroids. We built temples of free inquiry and turned them into places where half the country’s ideas cannot be spoken aloud. Then we act surprised when students emerge believing that certain ideas are not arguments to be refuted, but opinions to be silenced—and those who hold them deserve whatever the hell they get.

When Ketanji Brown Jackson was but a nominee to the Supreme Court of the this great land, she was asked to define the word “woman” and answered that she couldn’t because she’s not a biologist. As someone later quipped, I’m not a veterinarian but I know what a dog is. Think about what it takes for an accomplished jurist to be unable to say aloud what every grandmother in human history has known. Think about the number of intelligent people who have been pulled in by such rhetoric, or stood by as their own children got pulled in, because they held truth and reason more cheaply in their own esteem than wanting to seem like a good person. This has consequences in women’s sports, in women’s prisons, in women’s shelters. We have gutted protections that the feminist movement bravely spent a century building. We have become cowards. We have abandoned our daughters because we are terrified of seeming intolerant. That’s what the oppressor doctrine does when it fully captures institutions. It doesn’t protect the vulnerable, it decides who is allowed to be vulnerable.

Or consider the Summer of Love. George Floyd’s death was a tragedy, and the officers responsible were rightly prosecuted and convicted, but what followed was a moral panic that burned billions in property, defunded police in cities, and then watched their most vulnerable, and disproportionately black, neighborhoods absorb a surge in violence. Worse, question any of it and you weren’t wrong—you were racist and therefore evil. Or look at our streets since October 7, with young Americans marching in support of a movement that raped and slaughtered 1,200 people, including children, and celebrated it in real time, a movement whose founding father was a Nazi collaborator who adored Hitler, and that openly calls for the annihilation of the Jewish state and chants slogans that reference the genocide of all Jews everywhere. How is that possible? What happened to all those years of work advancing awareness about antisemitism? Again, what cowards we are, what cowards we have become, where even atrocity is framed as resistance. It’s the same broken compass that lets a hammer and sickle hang on a dorm room wall but not a Nazi flag, despite the fact that communism’s death toll is vastly larger. Both are monstrous, but only one gets a shrug.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking. And you’re right. The censor’s temptation is not owned by one side. When a government detains legal residents for their political speech, when officials target news outlets they dislike, every one of us should oppose this, loudly, whatever we think of the speech in question. But a fever and a chronic disease are not the same illness. What we face in our schools, our media, our museums, and our HR departments is not one strongman’s excess but a slow institutional capture, a subversion of our entire society, of our very understanding of reality itself, and it’s harder to fight precisely because, as these things generally go, you only find your voice after the hour is already late. And late it is.

But it’s not too late, not just yet. The cure for a doctrine that forbids love of country is standing in line at a Waffle House holding a selfie stick. Every one of those videos—the refills, the mountains, the Deli Guy—gives me hope in this battle. Our visitors apparently don’t know the rules. Nobody told them America goes in the oppressor box. So they just look at the actual country, the land, the food, the people, the freedom, and report what they see. They are holding up a mirror, and in that mirror is a nation that is, by any honest measure, the greatest experiment in human self-governance in the history of civilization.

Progressives especially, I am asking you to look. Your country is worth loving. Loving it is not the same as ignoring its failures—Frederick Douglass proved that, holding America to its own promise with a fiercer patriotism than today’s complacent defenders ever mustered. Yes, you can demand better and still feel gratitude. Yes, you can fight for change and still feel wonder. But a movement that cannot say “I love this country” without irony is a movement that will keep losing the people who feel that love most deeply. The left has lost its vocabulary for patriotism. And you must find it once more. I would even argue that your only hope of ever winning the fight you continue to fight is by having some measure of the wonder that I describe. The people arriving from Italy and Senegal and South Korea and Morocco are feeling that wonder now, for the first time, with fresh eyes. They are seeing the beauty and privilege you have stopped allowing yourself to see.

We, as Americans, must find our spine and remember to teach our children well. Teach them the difference between right and wrong. Teach them that people are individuals, not boxes. Teach them the courage to speak, especially when their opinions go against the grain. We call ourselves the home of the brave. It’s time we earned the name again.

In a few days, the World Cup final will be played in New Jersey, under American skies, and however the game ends, people from every nation on earth will go home having seen something they didn’t expect. They will go home having seen America. This July 4th, as we turn 250, let us try to see it too. Let us be a home of the brave. God bless you all. And damn it, God bless the United States of America.