Category: blaze media

When WNBA coach Stephanie White of the Indiana Fever spoke to reporters on Wednesday, her comments seemingly began as a defense of her player Caitlin Clark.

However, standing up for her star guard seemed like a sidebar to a rant that ran through a near-exhaustive list of buzzwords about diversity.

‘Our league is about elevating — elevating women.’

There has been immense blowback from casual viewers about the on-court treatment of Clark, which culminated when she received a fist to the throat from Phoenix Mercury player Alyssa Thomas while on the ground.

While no foul was issued during the game, Thomas was eventually handed a flagrant foul 2 and a one-game suspension.

Thomas has since alleged she’s received threats online, which Coach White decided to address in Wednesday’s media scrum.

“I think as a league as a whole, there’s been so much more toxicity, racism, homophobia, straight-out, like, nonsense, hate nonsense. And it is absolutely unacceptable,” White began.

With her scope immediately broadening to all progressive politics, the head coach soon assured fans that the WNBA is about as liberal as a sports league could be.

“Our league is about inclusiveness. Our league is about competition. Our league is about elevating — elevating women, elevating marginalized communities,” White listed off.

The 49-year-old wasn’t finished there, saying the league’s views included “being inclusive of all different walks of life” while even claiming the WNBA has been and will continue to be “on the forefront of social norms.”

White added, “That is what our league has always been about from day one. That is what our league will continue to be about.”

RELATED: Caitlin Clark gets fist to the throat as WNBA primed to explode: ‘She’s a straight white basketball player’

The coach also claimed most of the alleged online abuse directed at Thomas was not from WNBA fans, but rather the “online community.”

White then said that it was an attempt by online actors to use the WNBA for their own politics.

“I believe that this is people who are using our league, using our players to further divisive agendas. It’s not acceptable,” she reaffirmed.

White did manage to get some time in for the actual subject at hand — her star player — by saying the league was not effective in communicating with Clark regarding the foul and her treatment.

“We have to continue to protect our players. We’ve got to continue to support our players in our league,” White said.

However, the coach made sure to sprinkle in comments like: “It’s not hard to not be a jerk. And if you are one of these people that are online doing this, do not call yourself a WNBA fan.”

RELATED: Comedian Druski and BET Awards LAMPOON the black church

Andy Lyons/Getty Images

According to the New York Times, Thomas said that she was not even aware of her foul against Clark until after the game.

“A lot of us, myself included, didn’t even know the play took place until after the game, and now we’re being painted as thugs and there’s death threats out on us, so it’s really unacceptable. It’s something that needs to change in this league, and I’m just really sick and tired of it,” Thomas reportedly said after her team’s practice on Tuesday.

Thomas also reportedly claimed that she had not heard from the WNBA commissioner’s office, but inside sources from the Times claimed that the commissioner “exchanged texts and offered to get on a call with Alyssa Thomas last week.”

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One of the reasons I am alarmed by the socialist/communist trends in my own country is that I visited such countries in my youth.

My first look at communism was at Checkpoint Charlie in West Berlin in 1984. There, you crossed into East Berlin (the communist side) through a barbed wire, land-mined, machine gun-guarded, no-man’s land.

The bite wound — on her hand — appeared serious enough to require an antiseptic. But where could they find that, late at night, in Havana?

People had died trying to cross it.

Once inside East Berlin, you immediately saw why. The city was lifeless, poor, and depressing. The people were ugly and not safe to interact with. The general misery was suffocating. It was a huge relief to get back to West Berlin.

In the following years, I had other experiences in the “democratic socialist” countries of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, which were also chillingly prison-like and horrific.

After several decades of communism, all the normal people in these countries had escaped or died. Only the creeps, criminals, and mentally enfeebled remained.

I always believed that if Americans could see for themselves what “democratic socialism” looks like, they would be instantly dissuaded from supporting or advocating for it.

But as I’ve learned, that is not always the case.

Americans abroad

My favorite example is when an American friend (35) and her mother (61) visited Cuba in the 2010s. They were an adventurous duo and fairly seasoned travelers.

They were also very liberal. They both donated to NPR. They were both ardent fans of Rachel Maddow. And they would later suffer from severe cases of Trump derangement syndrome.

So what did they think of socialist Cuba? And its poverty, corruption, and lack of economic opportunity?

They loved it. They thought Cuba was great.

RELATED: Liberal critics hate ‘The Wizard of the Kremlin’ — that’s how I knew it was worth a watch

Curiosa Films

Royalty among the peasants

Now, I have traveled to third-world countries myself, and I have been impressed by the resilience of the people. There is something romantic about such cultures, something satisfying about the simplicity and earthiness of their lives.

Part of the enjoyment of such places is that all standards are lowered. The locals are poor and uneducated. You are practically a philosopher-king among the peasants. You can relax and enjoy your superiority.

Havana moon

When my friend and her mother returned from Cuba, she told me about their trip: the great food, the picturesque street life. The two had gone to nightclubs and danced to incredible live music.

The locals fawned over them. A kindly Cuban woman invited them to her house for dinner. They bought peasant skirts, handmade hats, and local jewelry.

It was all very romantic. Everyone was so nice to them. The locals appreciated their interest in Cuban culture.

Straight from the horse’s mouth

They did have one problem though. The mother, while strolling along the promenade in Havana, was bitten by a horse.

The bite wound — on her hand — appeared serious enough to require an antiseptic. But where could they find that, late at night, in Havana?

No pharmacies were open. So they found a sympathetic bartender who doused the wound with vodka and wrapped it in a bar towel as best he could.

In the morning, it was worse. They had to find a doctor, which was not easy to do.

Finally, they found an English-speaking doctor, who was eager to help them once he found out the mother was married to a doctor in America.

He properly dressed the wound but mostly peppered the mother and daughter with questions about doctors in the USA. How much did they make? What kind of car did they drive? How big was their house?

The doctor hounded them for contact information. He was plotting his own escape. Fortunately, he had not escaped already and was there to help the mother with her horse-bitten hand.

Socialists love their socialism

I don’t mean to be critical of my friend, but this trip demonstrated why left-leaning liberals don’t see any problem with a socialist government.

To them, the slower pace of life is spiritually enriching. Not to mention the delicious food. And the soulful music.

If only Americans could be more like the Cubans. If only we weren’t such money-grubbing workaholics and could just relax and enjoy those sultry nights and the gorgeous Havana moon, which shone so bright in the sky (mostly because there was no electricity for street lights).

No, socialists love their socialism. Or rather their dream of socialism. I noticed that my friend was very happy to be back in the suburbs, to get back to her yoga class and her air-conditioned Suburu.

​Blake’s progress, Socialism, Cuba, East berlin 

When Glenn Beck first learned that the 2026 FIFA World Cup would be hosted in America, he immediately lamented that “all the people that hate us are going to come” and further the bash the country.

But it seems the opposite has happened. Tourists from all over the world have been proclaiming praise for America and its people — even accusing their own countries of lying to them about the United States.

On a recent episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” Glenn sat down with Andrew Brocklesby — a British-American from Nottingham, England, who moved to the U.S. in 2020 — to discuss exactly how the British media convinced so many millions of people to fear and hate America.

– YouTube

Brocklesby explains that in the U.K., America is portrayed by the media and in TV shows like “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy” as a place defined by “war” that’s run by a “bad person” (Trump).

“You can imagine my shock when I first came to the U.S. … I’ve had not a single issue. It’s been absolutely wonderful. The community here has just blown me away,” he tells Glenn, noting that the Southerners he lives among now have been quite the opposite of the “hillbillies” England portrays them to be.

Social media, Brocklesby says, is full of evidence that the U.K.’s anti-America propaganda has been hugely effective. He cites viral street interviews where British people cringe and recoil at the idea of visiting the United States.

“I recommend anyone in the U.K., if they’re listening to this, please, please come to the U.S. Come to the South, anywhere in the U.S. You’re going to be blown away, and you’re not going to want to go home,” he says.

“It’s almost as if we’ve been made into cartoons for the rest of the world,” Glenn says, recalling a story about a black Canadian woman who was legitimately afraid to visit Texas because there are “guns and racists everywhere.”

From what he’s experienced, Brocklesby says Texas “might be one of the safest places in the entire world.”

“Everyone has guns for a reason, and that’s to protect themselves, their family, and the community. That’s what it’s all about. You’re going to be safe,” he says.

Glenn then asks Brocklesby about the notion of “free speech,” which England claims to protect despite its significant legal restrictions on hate speech, “offensive” expression, and other categories of speech.

Free speech in England is “not the same” as free speech in the U.S., Glenn says. “Our Bill of Rights makes things different.”

“One thing that really breaks my heart since becoming a U.S. citizen … is you’re not allowed to fly the Union Jack or the England flag because it’s seen as rude, offensive, racist,” Brocklesby says.

“What I want people in my home country to understand … [is] the flag stands for community. It stands for what you envision the country to be, and you should be proud of that,” he continues. “And the fact that you can be fined and arrested in the U.K. for voicing your own opinion now is absolutely disgusting, and I’m so hurt for my family and my friends back home.”

“What’s the best thing about America?” Glenn asks.

“The community,” Brocklesby says. “Everyone just looks out for each other, no matter who you are. … That doesn’t happen anywhere else.”

“There is no other country in the entire world that does it quite like America.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

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In his 1956 essay “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” C.S. Lewis separates the creator of any given imaginative work (novel, poem, etc.) into two distinct identities: the Author and the Man.

The Author, initiator of the creation, is he who first feels the desire to put imagined scenes to form. For him, it’s inspiring, it’s fun. It is the Man, on the other hand, who elevates the work. He supplements it by sprouting meaning within the Author’s vision. The two are essential to any great work, says Lewis, in order to create something that is just as edifying as it is pleasing.

I am there to define, explain, or find out more alongside them. We learn together. Each individual piece in the book acts as a wellspring for more.

It is within Dr. Matthew Mehan’s most recent work — a 375-page tome for all ages, which commemorates our nation’s 250th anniversary — that we see Lewis’ united Author-Man theory perfectly executed.

A good, new book

“The American Book of Fables” is, at long last, a good, new book. Not a reprint of a forgotten favorite, not an old “classic” we must dust off and apply new pictures to. But a new classic, which explores both the natural splendor and man-made creations that make up our United States — alongside (or rather, through) beautiful poetry and prose and stunning illustrations by master artist John Folley.

The book is divided into 13 parts. Each one is introduced by a unique portion of text from the Declaration of Independence and focuses on a different ecological region of the country. Within the text, we find poems, rhymes, fables, and true narrations of America’s historical and cultural traditions. Ensuring no one is left out of the book’s offerings, Mehan includes something each for “littles,” “middles,” and “bigs” in every chapter.

On a personal level (I’m a homeschool mom), this setup has been invaluable. I say this because this year, as we lead up to the semiquincentennial, I’ve struggled with exactly where to begin in teaching my small children about the greatness of our nation.

Yes, we’ll be going to the Independence Day parade in our town. We’ll wear red, white, and blue and wave American flags. We’ll see fireworks and eat hot dogs. But I’d be lying if I said I actually thought these activities mean nearly as much as having a true understanding of America — its epic history, its diverse beauty, its superb design.

Bigs and littles

This is what “The American Book of Fables” offers. I’m able to start my eager 4-year old with the rhymes and poetry in the “littles” section. My 6-year-old especially enjoys the fables of the “middles” section. And I myself have learned a great deal from the section for “bigs,” which we will undoubtedly graduate our kids to as they get older.

It was last fall that I had the honor of interviewing Dr. Mehan about his book, which was then still in the works. Talking with him via FaceTime, I had one of those experiences where I was so obviously in over my head in regard to the content of our discussion. I pride myself on being rather well-read and knowledgeable of historical facts and general information. But Dr. Mehan is a walking encyclopedia of the Western canon. His knowledge of the great books, the great thinkers, and all related fields is light-years beyond my own. I won’t fib and say I didn’t sometimes struggle to remember my philosophers and to understand some of the concepts we discussed.

I don’t say this to stir pity, but rather to emphasize a theme that I’ve come to understand in both talking with Dr. Mehan and reading his book. And that is that it’s good to be a bit in over your head. In fact, this is the way the best thinkers learn. It is, for instance, how our founding fathers learned. And somewhere over the last 250 years, we Americans have forgotten that.

Antidote to brain rot

Shining the spotlight on modern-day kids’ literature, I hate to be the millionth parent to say it, but much of it is brain rot. If it doesn’t lack a moral center, it lacks plot or meaning entirely. The oversimplified Corporate Memphis illustrations add nothing. Sometimes, the books are actually evil — for example, in those that encourage kids to believe it’s possible to change their sex.

The children of the founding generation dined on far heartier intellectual fare. And this drove the entire educational process from youth through adulthood.

When we talk about the greatness of America, we do ourselves a disservice by only skimming off the top of what the founding fathers created. Dr. Mehan emphasizes that it’s important to go deeper and examine what they themselves read, studied, and mulled over. This is, after all, what created their imaginations. And “it is just that ‘brilliant imagination’ that formed a crucial and prior condition for all of the founders’ deliberations, words, and deeds — the very things that brought about the formation of this great country,” Dr. Mehan explains.

RELATED: ‘The American Family’s Book of Fables’: Wit and wisdom for our nation’s 250th

Matt Mehan at work (l, photo by his son) and on a research trip to the Everglades (r). Hulton Archive/Getty Images/mythicalmammal.com

A rich tapestry

In “The American Book of Fables,” Dr. Mehan creates a tapestry of Judeo-Christian values, lessons from the “Book of Nature,” ancient philosophy, Greek and Roman myths, beast fables, and other imagery that the founding fathers studied. He accomplishes this while weaving within them his own tales and adapting certain works to American soil.

As the title implies, fable stories feature prominently in the book. Fables are, to most modern Americans, a type of story for kids. Historically, however, fables were read and appreciated by adults just as much as children. According to Mehan, these tales were fundamental in the teaching of right from wrong but also in the teaching of human passions and self-government.

The more you read fables, the clearer it becomes that individual animals tend to have their own lower order passions they struggle with. Humans share the same struggles. The pig, for example, the gluttonous pig, errs in his gluttony — a sin that is likewise certainly not unheard of in humans. So how do you learn from the pig and govern yourself better? The fables were very much a part of early America’s self-governing spirit and, Mehan says, were mentioned often in the letters and speeches of the founding fathers.

As my family reads “The American Book of Fables” together, my kids are sometimes flummoxed by new words or ideas. They have a lot of questions. What’s a lynx? What was the Navajo Nation? What does “candor” mean?

Literature to last

But again, this is a good thing. And it’s why this is a family book. I am there to define, explain, or find out more alongside them. We learn together. Each individual piece in the book acts as a wellspring for more — to look up pictures of the Rocky Mountains or videos of otters swimming, to discuss what the Independence Bell is and why it’s important, or to talk about the marriage of John and Abigail Adams — or what marriage means, for that matter. Each line of text and each beautiful image provides thread for new stitches in our own imaginative tapestries.

Two-hundred fifty years from now, God-willing new generations of good Americans will be celebrating our nation’s quincentenary, our 500th anniversary. All of us alive today will be gone. But the good literature of our time will live on, as we have seen good literature do for thousands of years before us.

Undoubtedly, “The American Book of Fables” will make it to that time. Its beautiful pages and stories will continue to enlighten the minds of Americans and their children for innumerable generations to come.

​Review, Books, Matthew mehan, The american book of fables, America at 250 

On June 14, President Trump hosted UFC Freedom 250 on the White House South Lawn for his 80th birthday and America’s 250th anniversary. The historic event featured seven thrilling fights, showcasing some of the UFC’s top fighters in a one-of-a-kind display of American strength and resilience.

But Trump isn’t the first president to host fights at the White House. Many forget that Teddy Roosevelt regularly used the president’s house for sparring and boxing, often training with military aides, visitors, and even professional boxers as part of his “strenuous life” philosophy.

This penchant for physical and mental toughness translated to his six children. Roosevelt was known for pushing them toward strenuous activities, outdoor adventures, and intellectual curiosity that would hone their physical skills and their moral character.

“He would just take [his young children] out in the middle of the forest and say, ‘Find your way home,”’ Glenn Beck recounts to bestselling author Brad Meltzer, who is known for his children’ s books on prominent American figures.

Out of all the American figures he’s written about over the years, Teddy Roosevelt, Meltzer says, is “the most complicated.”

While Roosevelt’s political career is undeniably marked by several controversial decisions and beliefs, he chose to focus on the 26th president’s best traits in his new book, “I am Teddy Roosevelt.”

Roosevelt’s father, Meltzer explains, taught young Teddy to stand up for the underprivileged and downtrodden. “His father says, ‘When you have money and you have power, that doesn’t make you fantastic or strong or terrific. What it does is it gives you a responsibility — a responsibility to help other people,”’ he recalls, noting that this care for others extended especially to orphans and the working class.

Roosevelt’s protectiveness translated to the environment as well. He is widely regarded as America’s greatest conservationist president thanks to establishing five national parks, 150 national forests, 51 federal bird reserves, four national game preserves, and protecting roughly 230 million acres of public land during his presidency.

While Glenn understands why a children’s book should highlight Roosevelt’s strengths, he personally has a difficult time reconciling some of his controversial perspectives.

“He was a big eugenist guy,” says Glenn, highlighting how Roosevelt pushed for more breeding among certain white Americans while discouraging it among people he saw as unfit or inferior.

Meltzer agrees that Roosevelt’s belief in eugenics is deeply problematic but still finds him “an incredibly great hero” — especially for kids.

“I think today Teddy Roosevelt is sometimes held out as being that strong guy, the macho guy … but that’s not who he is when he’s growing up. He’s actually sick a lot. He’s smaller than everyone else. He gets picked on,” he says.

“He had mice and spiders he used to keep in his room. He was a weird kid,” he adds.

But tragic loss would soon turn the fragile, intellectual Teddy into the tough, fearless leader he’s best known for today.

“His father dies and then soon after his mother and his wife die on the same day, Glenn, on Valentine’s Day,” says Meltzer.

“He moves to their ranch out in North Dakota, and … he just sits under the stars, and he listens to the wolves. … And if being out in nature teaches him anything, it’s that success doesn’t come from having natural gifts; it comes from how hard you work those gifts,” he continues, “and that’s where he falls in love and starts protecting the outdoors.”

On July 4, 1886, in a speech in Dickinson, Dakota Territory (his first major Independence Day address as a young rancher/politician), Roosevelt famously said, “Like all Americans, I like big things; big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat fields, railroads — and herds of cattle too; big factories, steamboats, and everything else. But we must keep steadily in mind that no people were ever yet benefited by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue.”

“That’s when he starts protecting Yellowstone and Yosemite and Niagara Falls, and he creates five national parks. … They exist because of Teddy Roosevelt,” says Meltzer.

Glenn’s favorite Roosevelt story by far, however, is his shocking response to being shot in the chest while on his way to deliver a 90-minute campaign speech in Milwaukee. Instead of seeking immediate medical care, Roosevelt delivered the speech anyway, famously declaring, “It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose!”

“Where does [that kind of strength] come from?” exclaims Glenn.

“[Roosevelt] is complicated,” Meltzer emphasizes, “but he has these hero moments that you’re like, ‘Oh my goodness.”’

To hear more, watch the video above.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​The glenn beck program, Glenn beck, Teddy roosevelt 

A Florida motorist was arrested Tuesday after Polk County deputies said he sideswiped an ambulance and injured a paramedic in the crash, WFLA-TV reported.

The Polk County Sheriff’s Office said an ambulance was traveling north on Harden Boulevard when a driver in a Volkswagen Jetta made a U-turn in front of the ambulance, the station said.

‘He was vulgar and rude to the deputy and had to be removed from the patrol car after he refused to get out of it.’

“After completing the U-turn, the Jetta entered the lane occupied by the ambulance, and the vehicles collided,” the sheriff’s office said, according to WFLA.

Deputies said the Jetta driver then left the scene of the crash, the station reported, while a paramedic in the back of the ambulance was taken to a hospital with a neck injury following the crash.

The sheriff’s office told WFLA that deputies went to the home where the Jetta was registered and spoke with the owner of the car — and she said her nephew had been driving it.

Gregory McManus, 41, was found asleep on a couch, deputies told the station.

RELATED: Florida teens’ stupid ‘social media stunt’ earns them fittings for snazzy jail attire

“When deputies awakened him, he admitted that he had been involved in the crash, but claimed it was the ambulance driver’s fault,” Polk deputies said, according to the station.

The sheriff’s office said video from the ambulance “clearly showed that McManus had caused the crash,” WFLA noted.

Sheriff Grady Judd had this to say, according to the station: “Gregory McManus not only caused the crash, he fled from the scene without checking on anybody, and then had the audacity to claim the other driver was at fault. He was vulgar and rude to the deputy and had to be removed from the patrol car after he refused to get out of it. I doubt there is a responsible bone in his body.”

McManus was arrested and charged with leaving the scene of a crash with injury, WFLA said.

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​Florida, Polk county sheriff’s office, Polk county sheriff grady judd, Ambulance sideswiped, Arrest, Leaving the scene of a crash with injury, Crime 

A friend recently asked why so many Americans seem embarrassed by their own country.

The question came during the annual Fourth of July arguments about patriotism, flags, and whether America deserves to be celebrated. It reminded me of something the late Robert Woodson often said about America’s beginning.

Love does not require perfection. It requires stewardship. That seems like a good way to care for a family. And it seems like a good way to care for a nation.

Woodson acknowledged the contradiction at our founding: a nation proclaiming that all men are created equal while tolerating slavery. Others point to limited rights for women and other shortcomings present at the nation’s birth.

What interested Woodson was not the diagnosis but the response. He compared America to a child born with a birth defect. Loving parents do not deny the condition or abandon the child because of it. They adapt, advocate, protect, teach, accommodate, and love.

They learn stewardship.

Caregiving taught me that lesson long before I heard Woodson apply it to a nation. During one particularly difficult season, a wise friend told me something that permanently changed the way I viewed caregiving.

“Your wife has a Savior. You are not that Savior.”

For years I had lived as though my job was to fix everything. If I researched enough, worked hard enough, and sacrificed enough, I could somehow force life toward the outcome I wanted.

Eventually I collided with a truth every caregiver must learn. I could not control the outcome. I was accountable for my stewardship.

That realization changed the way I looked at life and the world.

For years I believed life would finally begin after the next surgery, the next recovery, the next crisis, or the next milestone. Like many caregivers, I kept telling myself that if we could just get through this one thing, then we could finally get on with our lives.

Eventually I realized this wasn’t a rehearsal. This was my life.

RELATED: Sorry, socialists: The system isn’t the savior

SAHAB ZARIBAF/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty Images

When I stopped trying to get through life in order to get on with life, I quit treading water waiting for rescue and learned to swim.

The problems remained. My stewardship changed.

Too often we tell ourselves that happiness waits on the other side of some future event. If only this election goes differently. If only this grievance is resolved. Then we can finally live.

Stewardship asks another question. Not, “Why wasn’t I given something better?” But, “What am I going to do with what I’ve been given?”

I’ve seen the difference between cultures that cultivate stewardship and cultures that discourage it.

Years ago, while helping establish our prosthetic limb outreach in West Africa, I worked alongside local technicians learning to build prosthetic legs for their own people. In one clinic, nearly every decision required approval from above.

One day I asked a technician a simple question. “What do you think?”

The puzzled expression on his face answered before he spoke. It wasn’t that he lacked intelligence. No one had ever expected him to own the decision.

America, at its best, asks that question every day. What do you think? What will you build? What responsibility are you willing to carry? That expectation lies near the heart of the American experiment.

America’s founding principles created room for reform because the nation’s founding documents proclaimed truths many of the founders themselves failed to live fully. Those same principles later became the standard by which Americans challenged slavery and expanded civil rights.

The story of America is not one of perfection. It is one of stewardship.

RELATED: Caregivers should not have to lie to prove compassion

asbe/iStock/Getty Images

Of course, stewardship is not the only response to a defect. Some people learn from it. Others exploit it.

Every family caring for someone with disabilities eventually encounters people more interested in the diagnosis than the person. Nations experience something similar. America’s original contradiction has served both as a call to greater fidelity and as a tool for those seeking power through perpetual grievance.

Woodson understood the difference. One path produces stewardship. The other manufactures resentment.

I love this country not because it is flawless, but because it repeatedly calls each generation to measure itself against ideals higher than itself.

When I look at my grandchildren, I hope they inherit a nation that prizes freedom, embraces responsibility, rewards merit, and teaches that life is shaped more by stewardship than by grievance.

What if we stopped waiting for the perfect election, the perfect apology, the perfect reckoning, or the perfect outcome before deciding to engage faithfully with the country we have? Imagine the gratitude, creativity, service, and responsibility that would follow.

Parents of children with disabilities understand this. Caregivers understand this. Love does not require perfection. It requires stewardship.

That seems like a good way to care for a family. And it seems like a good way to care for a nation.

​America, America 250, Caregiving, Faith, Family, Fourth of july, Gratitude, Opinion & analysis, Patriotism, Slavery, Stewardship 

While millions of Americans participate in Fourth of July festivities, many don’t know what exactly it is they’re celebrating; others may vaguely know, but the complete history of the United States is something they’ve long forgotten or were never taught.

On this episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” Glenn revisits a powerful but largely forgotten story about America’s dramatic birth — the hidden plots, betrayals, and extraordinary character that defined the days right before July 4.

“All of us celebrate Fourth of July — everybody does. But nobody knows what’s happening the days before the Fourth of July. … This is when this country was being born in two cities at the same time and on two completely different tracks,” says Glenn, “and those two tracks slam together on one morning.”

“Because while [Thomas] Jefferson is writing … what kind of men we could be [in the Declaration of Independence], George Washington is discovering the kind of men that we already have among us. The British fleet are coming,” he continues.

But a bloody war wasn’t the only plot to foil America. While the British fleet sat in the harbor awaiting the signal to invade New York, British Crown-appointed New York Governor William Tryon and New York City Mayor David Mathews were scheming to assassinate or kidnap George Washington.

“[Tryon and Matthews] are quietly buying off Continental soldiers, paying them to switch sides the moment the British land. … The minute the British land, they’re to turn their guns around and blow the powder magazines, seize the bridge at the north end of Manhattan, so Washington’s whole army is trapped on that island like fish in a barrel,” Glenn recounts.

One of the men in Washington’s personal “lifeguard” (secret service) — Thomas Hickey — was in on this plot.

“Hickey gets himself thrown in jail for passing counterfeit money, and he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He bragged to another prisoner about the conspiracy … well, that prisoner talked, and it landed in front of a secret committee tasked with sniffing out exactly this kind of treason committee led by a young New Yorker named John Jay,” says Glenn, highlighting Jay’s contributions from writing the famous Federalist Papers to becoming the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Jay’s task force, he says, is often described by historians as “the first American intelligence agency.”

Hickey’s trial for treason happened at the same time Jefferson was penning the Declaration of Independence — two “tracks” Glenn says “come together” in a remarkable way.

On Monday, June 28, 1776, Hickey was publicly hanged for treason, making him “the first soldier this country ever executed for treason before we were a country,” Glenn explains.

At that same time, Jefferson went to Independence Hall with the finished draft of the Declaration of Independence in tow.

“One single morning, in one young nation that didn’t legally even exist yet, in one city, the words of who we wanted to become were first being read into the record. And another city just up the road, a man was being hung by a rope for trying to strangle that nation in its cradle,” Glenn summarizes. “The promise and the betrayal in the same hour — 90 miles apart.”

Four days later on July 2, Congress voted to approve a resolution for independence.

“The ink isn’t even dry and the enemy is already in the water,” says Glenn.

“It would have been so easy in that moment of terror — invasion coming, traitors in the ranks, the mayor himself in on it — for Washington to become the very thing that they were fighting.”

Instead he refused to become a tyrant, choosing to uphold the rule of law and the ideals of the revolution even when it was risky and difficult.

“In the middle of the most dangerous month of their life, with a knife already at the Republic’s throat, they chose process over panic, law over vengeance. And in the same breath, in the same week, they put their names down on this document that said power has to answer to something higher than its own power,” says Glenn.

“That’s who we are. That’s who we were. That’s who we can be every day going forward.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

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Radicals worked with revolutionary gusto in recent years to erase America’s past. In addition to melting down busts, digging up graves, renaming species, knocking out church windows, hiding artwork, killing off iconic brands, and advancing revisionist narratives, they did what all envy- and resentment-driven demolitionists — from the Jacobins to the Taliban — have done: They toppled and removed statues.

Among the giants whom the radicals fell but could never slay — a long list that includes Spanish missionary Junípero Serra and Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln — are two men in particular whose greatness not only secured for them pedestals and the ire of barbarians but made the nation today possible: George Washington and Christopher Columbus.

‘Washington laid the groundwork for the steady march toward emancipation and liberty.’

Every toppled statue tells three stories: the first, about the people who raised it and the kind of person they thought worthy of public memorialization; the second, about the people who tore it down and what they want forgotten; and the third, about the kind of figure who can cast a shadow over lesser men even after his likeness is shattered.

Over two decades after becoming an American, Italian-born sculptor Pompeo Coppini produced — at the request of Henry Waldo Coe, a pioneer doctor and close friend of President Theodore Roosevelt — a 1,920-pound, roughly eight-foot bronze sculpture of his adopted homeland’s first president, George Washington.

The statue, which the Portland Monuments Project currently lists as being “in storage in need of repair,” depicts the great general who commanded the Continental Army to victory in the American War of Independence standing tall with a walking stick in his right hand and a tricorn hat in his left.

Coe, who would not live long enough to attend the statue’s dedication ceremony on July 4, 1927, gave the monument to Portland, Oregon, to honor the 1926 sesquicentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

RELATED: 4 Confederate statues make their return — but their fate hangs in the balance

Portland.gov

The statue was installed outside the German American Society in northeast Portland’s Rose City Park neighborhood and presented by Rev. William Wallace Youngson, the clergyman who established the Rose City Park Methodist Episcopal Church.

One comment shared during the recent city-led conversations about the statue reflects the apparent understanding of those who helped raise the statue a century ago:

The purpose of these statues is not to make a statement that these men are saints, but rather to honor their achievements and place in history. I want to briefly touch on Washington. Besides his leadership in the American Revolution and founding our country, Washington was remarkable in his commitment to republicanism. He refused an offer to be King, in the 18th century, in the age of absolute monarchs. This was the same time as Catherine the Great, Frederick the Great, and the height of the French ancien regime (before its demise during the French Revolution). He and the other founders created one of the first democratic bodies since the Roman Senate. True, our democracy was imperfect in the 1790s (and is today). But, Washington laid the groundwork for the steady march toward emancipation and liberty we have seen through 230 years of American history.

The barbarian horde evidently couldn’t tolerate the sight of this great man.

On the eve of June 19, 2020, iconoclasts lit a fire on the statue’s head, then tore it down. Vandals then spray-painted leftist slogans such as “genocidal colonist,” “you’re on native lands,” “BLM,” “1619,” and “Big Floyd” on the toppled figure.

Rather than restore it to its pedestal, the city sent a tow truck to remove the first president’s likeness and toss it into storage. No arrests were made in connection with this destructive episode.

According to the city of Portland, the statue will be returned to the public “pending relocation, restoration, repair, and the addition of new interpretive signage.”

Regardless of whether this statue — paid for by a pioneer doctor, sculpted by an immigrant, and presented by a clergyman — will ultimately be restored, Washington’s indelible mark can never be honestly denied, certainly not in an American state neighboring his namesake.

Christopher Columbus — the Italian “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” who sailed under the Spanish flag and whose four transatlantic voyages set the stage for American civilization — was one of the 2020 iconoclasts’ most popular targets, with over 30 statues bearing his likeness toppled and/or removed during that leftist spasm of violence.

One of those monuments was a 7.3-foot statue carved in Italian Carrara marble by sculptor Mauro Bigarani, dedicated to the city of Baltimore by its Italian community and the Italian American Organization United of Maryland in commemoration of the discovery of America, and unveiled on Oct. 8, 1984, in Columbus Piazza by then-Mayor William Donald Schaefer and President Ronald Reagan.

The statue’s marble base, itself nearly eight feet tall, stated, “Discoverer of America,” and depicted the three ships of the Columbus fleet: the Santa Maria, the Pinta, and the Nina.

Reagan stated at the unveiling, “Americans of Italian descent have given a great deal to this country. Their contribution began 492 years ago when Christopher Columbus, the son of a Genoa weaver, set forth on a voyage of discovery that changed the world.”

“The ideals, which many successive Italian immigrants brought with them, are at the very heart of America. I’m speaking of hard work, love of family, patriotism, and respect for God,” continued the president. “Columbus challenged the unknown when he sailed westward in 1492. He was a man of vision who saw an opportunity, set down a plan, and then worked diligently to carry it forth.”

Highlighting why Columbus is still remembered and why, in part, he is so hated by the forces of darkness, Reagan noted further, “When Columbus discovered America, he set in force a motion mightier than the world had ever known.”

On July 4, 2020, the barbarian horde marched through Baltimore’s Little Italy neighborhood in search of a target. After harassing restaurant patrons and other residents, they set to work on bringing down Columbus’ likeness.

After finally yanking down the statue, members of the horde jumped on the broken figure and paraded around with marble fragments. An activist yelled over a megaphone, “Get him in the harbor. Get rid of this n****r,” then the horde dragged the remains into the harbor.

The radicals marching across the city at the time of this particular iconoclastic episode reportedly demanded the defunding of police, reparations for blacks, and the removal of all statues “honoring white supremacists, owners of enslaved people, perpetrators of genocide, and colonizers.”

Again, there were no arrests in connection with the incident. In fact, city officials effectively sanctioned the destruction.

A spokesman for then-Mayor Bernard Young said that the statue’s destruction was part of a “re-examination taking place nationally and globally around some of these monuments and statues that may represent different things to different people.”

‘Christopher Columbus was the original American hero.’

Current Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, then serving as city council president, rushed to remind everyone that he previously advocated for the statue’s removal: “I support Baltimore’s Italian-American community and Baltimore’s indigenous community. I cannot, however, support Columbus.”

Like Washington, Columbus’ memory could not be so easily erased from the minds of the many by a radical few. Nevertheless, President Donald Trump made sure that this particular statue would be raised in the nation’s capital for all to see.

RELATED: America turns 250 with a broken heart

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

With pieces of the statue recovered from the harbor by the Knights of Columbus, local artist Tilghman Hemsley and his son Will built a 9.5-foot, 2,000-pound replica with the help of funds raised by Italian-American businessmen and $30,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

After the city of Baltimore refused to install the replica in public, the Italian American Organizations United Inc. gifted it to the White House, which installed it on the north side of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on March 22.

Trump thanked the Italian-American groups for the statue, noting that “Christopher Columbus was the original American hero and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the Earth.”

“Guided by steadfast prayer and unwavering fortitude and resolve, Columbus’ voyage in 1492 carried thousands of years of wisdom, philosophy, reason, and culture across the Atlantic into the Americas — paving the way for the ultimate triumph of Western civilization less than three centuries later on July 4, 1776,” added Trump.

The toppled Washington and Columbus statues each tell three stories, but in both cases, only the stories of the great and the grateful really matter. America is, after all, not the product of bitter demolitionists but of discoverers, pioneers, builders, and protectors — and those who carry on their legacy.

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Bestselling author and cultural commentator Eric Metaxas set out with the intention to tell the true story of the American Revolution.

“I said, ‘I just want to write a very compelling, very readable, fun, gallop-through-our-history [book],’” he tells Glenn Beck.

But as Metaxas researched, he kept coming across details from our history that “astonished” him.

One of those details had to do with none other than America’s first president. Many modern historians have labeled Washington a deist — that is, one who believes in a distant God who created the world but does not intervene in human affairs. These are generally the same people who argue that America was not founded as a Christian nation.

Metaxas calls the claim that Washington was a deist “baloney.”

“Washington was no deist. What a joke. What a lie,” he exclaims.

“These were men of profound Christian faith who set about doing something that had never been done since the Israelites were in the Sinai wilderness, where they left Pharaoh and left Egypt and looked directly to God without an earthly king. … This is what the founders were trying to do,” he explains.

All of the founders, he argues, understood that the goal was to “bring the Bible into government.”

“I was so overwhelmed by the explicitly Christian nature of what was going on. … Everywhere you look, this narrative comes out. It is inescapable,” Metaxas tells Glenn, noting that his book is not “a Christian book” but “a book of American history.”

For years, Glenn has been trying to debunk the same misleading narrative.

“In this one letter [George Washington wrote], I think it’s 24 different scriptures are quoted without him quoting it. It’s just part of his language,” he says.

Glenn notes that there are numerous accounts of the founders, including Washington, speaking about miracles.

“A deist cannot believe in miracles,” he remarks.

Agreeing, Metaxas says, “It is our duty to know this.”

But he could never find a book that told the full truth about America’s birth.

This gap is what inspired him to write “Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World,” which just released last month.

“This is our 250th,” he says. “This is our last exit before the toll. We the people need to understand how our government works, … that all of our founders understood our liberties come from God.”

To hear more about Metaxas’ new book, watch the video above.

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It’s common knowledge that Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown, Virginia, effectively ended the Revolutionary War — but what happened to the British general after that humiliating defeat?

According to the Library of Virginia, the Siege of Yorktown — which turned out to be the final major military engagement of the Revolutionary War — took place in the autumn of 1781.

‘He refused, however, to surrender in person and delegated the humiliating duty to his second in command.’

The British Army and its commanding general, Charles Cornwallis, were headquartered in the coastal Virginia town.

However, a French fleet under the command of Admiral François-Joseph-Paul de Grasse drove a British fleet from the Capes of Virginia, which made it impossible for Cornwallis to receive supplies and reinforcements, the Library of Virginia said.

American Gen. George Washington led his army from New York to Virginia, and — along with a large French and American army under Comte de Rochambeau — Washington laid siege to the British at Yorktown, the Library of Virginia said, adding that those forces joined the Marquis de Lafayette, who was commanding an American army that had been fighting the British in Virginia for six months.

More from the Library of Virginia:

The siege began on October 6, 1781, as the Americans and French formed a semicircle outside of the town and began an artillery bombardment. A successful storming of two British redoubts, or small temporary defensive enclosures, convinced Cornwallis that his position was untenable, and he surrendered his army to the combined American and French forces on October 19. He refused, however, to surrender in person and delegated the humiliating duty to his second in command. Washington consequently directed his second in command to receive the surrender.

Below is one of several famed clips from Mel Gibson’s starring Hollywood turn in “The Patriot” depicting Cornwallis’ disbelief that an army of “peasants” actually had defeated him:

RELATED: BREAKING: Cornwallis surrenders in Yorktown; end of war may be in sight

Nine days after his surrender, Cornwallis signed a parole document, the Library of Virginia said; under its terms, Cornwallis was allowed to leave Virginia and return to Great Britain on the condition that he would engage in no further military action against the United States.

However, Cornwallis’ army remained in the U.S. as prisoners of war until they were exchanged or paroled, the Library of Virginia said, adding that Cornwallis — “an able military commander” — was “received warmly in England and served as governor-general of India from 1786 until his death in 1805.”

The Library of Virginia noted that a formal peace treaty ended the Revolutionary War nearly two years after Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, and King George III recognized the independence of the United States of America.

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BlazeTV host Steve Deace released his latest book in May titled “Why Independence Day? America Is Great Because God Is Good.”

The Christian children’s book presents a faith-based retelling of American history, focused on the spiritual and historical roots of July 4th. It frames Independence Day as a celebration rooted in obedience to God over earthly kings and highlights America’s founding as a nation blessed by God with a role in spreading Christianity and freedom.

The book begins with God’s covenant with the Israelites, the coming of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and the early spread of Christianity. It then covers how early Christians and Puritans sought freedom to worship without a king acting as a god. The story continues through the American colonists’ grievances against the British crown, the Boston Tea Party, and the founding fathers’ meeting in Philadelphia.

On July 4, 1776, the founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence, an event the book presents as a declaration that Americans must obey God first. It goes on to recount the Revolutionary War, instances of divine providence, the victory at Yorktown, and the writing of the Constitution. The book concludes by noting that America became a “shining city on a hill” and references John Adams’ suggestion to celebrate Independence Day with prayer and “illuminations.”

The book achieved strong early sales, reaching No. 1 new release in the Christian children’s category on Amazon and landing in the top 15 new releases among all children’s books, regardless of genre.

In a recent episode of the “Steve Deace Show,” Deace performed a full live reading of the entire book. He explained that the reading gives listeners a chance to “sample exactly what’s inside” to determine if it’s a good fit for their kids and grandkids.

You can watch the full episode and hear Deace’s complete reading of “Why Independence Day? America Is Great Because God Is Good” here:

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The Fourth of July holds a special place in every American’s heart. In fact, as every patriot knows, the day has come to represent liberty and American greatness ever since the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

Since then, the day has seen a series of significant events, a number of notable births and deaths, and a couple of coincidences so perfect they almost don’t seem real over the course of the building of the greatest nation on earth.

‘I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival.’

Here are some snapshots of historical milestones on Independence Day that have led to the country we know and love today.

RELATED: ‘One nation under God’: Christians to march through DC as part of 2,000-mile Eucharistic procession

Official facsimile of the Declaration of Independence. Boston, Massachusetts. C. 1903/Library of Congress

1776 – The United States Declaration of Independence is adopted by the Second Continental Congress. John Adams, in a July 3 letter to his wife, Abigail, wrote that July 2 (the day Congress voted to approve the Lee Resolution) would be a day of celebration for Americans. Our celebrations today, though marking the official public announcement two days later, closely resemble his words:

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by Solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be Solemnized with Pomp and Parade with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

1802 – The United States Military Academy at West Point officially opens.

1803 – The Louisiana Purchase is announced to the American people.

John Adams II, son of President John Quincy Adams and the grandson of President John Adams, is born.

1804 – Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of “The Scarlet Letter” (1850) and “The House of the Seven Gables” (1851), is born.

1817 – Construction of the Erie Canal begins in Rome, New York.

1826 – Former Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both die on the same day — the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It’s enough to send a shiver down any patriot’s spine!

Thomas Jefferson, a philosopher, a patriot, and a friend. Michał Sokolnicki, 1760-1816, etcher/Tadeusz Kościuszko, 1746-1817, artist/Library of Congress

1826 – Prolific American composer Stephen Foster is born. Foster is known for songs like “Oh! Susanna” and “Camptown Races.”

1827 – Slavery is abolished in New York state.

1831 – James Monroe, the fifth U.S. president, dies in New York City. Monroe famously coined his eponymous doctrine warning European nations not to meddle in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere. Monroe’s presidency (1817-1825) has been called the “Era of Good Feelings.”

1838 – The Iowa Territory, which was first part of the Louisiana Purchase, is officially recognized. President Martin Van Buren appoints Ohio’s Robert Lucas as Iowa’s first territorial governor.

1847 – James Anthony Bailey is born in Detroit, Michigan. Bailey is best known for running the successful Barnum & Bailey Circus.

1855 – Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” is self-published in Brooklyn, New York. Whitman spent the next decades of his life editing and adding to this collection, resulting in several editions in circulation during his lifetime. These later editions, for example, “absorbed” an elegy he wrote for the assassinated Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

Walt Whitman, half-length portrait, seated, facing left, wearing hat and sweater, holding butterfly. Phillips & Taylor, photographer/Library of Congress

1863 – The Siege of Vicksburg, which began on May 18, ends. The Battle of Gettysburg ended just the day prior, lasting from July 1 to 3.

1872 – Calvin Coolidge, the 30th president of the United States, is born. Coolidge’s 1923 State of the Union address was the first presidential speech to be broadcast live on radio.

1876 – Centennial year since the founding of the United States. Celebrations centered on the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.

The flag that has waved 100 years. A scene on the morning of the Fourth of July 1876. Print shows African American man and others looking up as they raise the American flag with the U.S. Capitol in the background.. Dominique C. Fabronius; E.P. & L. Restein’s oilchromo, Phila.; National Chromo Co. pub., Phila./Library of Congress

1881 – Ulysses S. Grant III, grandson of general of the armies and U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant, is born. Grant III had a distinguished career in the United States Army, rising to the rank of major general. He graduated from the same West Point class as General Douglas MacArthur in 1903.

1884 – The Statue of Liberty is presented to U.S. Minister to France Levi Morton in a ceremony in Paris. The colossal statue was then disassembled and shipped to the United States. President Grover Cleveland dedicated the completed statue on October 28, 1886.

Statue of Liberty, Liberty Island, Manhattan, New York County, NY. Survey HAER NY-138/Library of Congress

1891 – Hannibal Hamlin, 15th vice president of the United States under President Abraham Lincoln, dies.

H.C. Howard/Library of Congress

1894 – The brief Republic of Hawaii is proclaimed before being annexed as a territory of the United States just four years later in 1898.

1910 – The Johnson-Jeffries race riots erupt throughout the country after Jack Johnson, a black man, beat James J. Jeffries, a white man who came out of retirement, in what was called the “Fight of the Century.” An article at the time said: “When news that Johnson had defeated Jeffries flashed over the wires last night, riots between whites and blacks followed in a dozen cities of the country, and reports this morning increase the number and add to the list of injured.”

1913 – President Woodrow Wilson addresses Union and Confederate Civil War veterans at the Great Reunion of 1913 on the grounds of Gettysburg. Wilson’s speech commemorated the 50th anniversary of the battle. Reflecting on the 50 years that had elapsed since that famous battle, Wilson said:

They have meant peace and union and vigor, and the maturity and might of a great nation. How wholesome and healing the peace has been! We have found one another again as brothers and comrades in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten — except that we shall not forget the splendid valor, the manly devotion of the men then arrayed against one another, now grasping hands and smiling into each other’s eyes. How complete the union has become and how dear to all of us, how unquestioned, how benign and majestic, as state after state has been added to this our great family of free men!

Poster showing Uncle Sam running with a bayonet, amid bursting shells. 1918. Library of Congress

1939 – Baseball legend Lou Gehrig delivers his famous speech at Yankee Stadium after his ALS diagnosis. Focusing on his blessings in life rather than the “bad break” of the deadly disease, Lou Gehrig famously said, “Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

1959 – The 49-star United States flag officially flies for the first time, following the addition of Alaska to the United States. The 49-star flag flew for exactly one year.

1960 – The 50-star United States flag officially flies for the first time, following the addition of Hawaii to the United States.

1976 – America’s bicentennial celebrates America’s 200th anniversary since the Declaration of Independence. The celebration consisted of around 66,000 recognized events.

1995 – American painter Bob Ross dies.

1997 – NASA’s Mars Pathfinder space probe successfully lands on Mars.

2004 – The cornerstone of the Freedom Tower is laid at Ground Zero in New York City. CBS News reported Gov. George E. Pataki (R) said, “Let this great freedom tower show the world that what our enemies sought to destroy — our democracy, our freedom, our way of life — stands taller than ever before.” The granite cornerstone is inscribed: “To honor and remember those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001, and as a tribute to the enduring spirit of freedom. — July Fourth, 2004.”

2009 – The Statue of Liberty’s crown is reopened to the public for the first time since the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Fireworks outlet near Decatur, Alabama. 2010. Carol M. Highsmith/Library of Congress

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With the signing of the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago, America’s founders accomplished something new under the sun: They brought into existence a nation rooted in the belief that individuals are by nature free and equal.

This year marks another achievement for the Declaration: Never before has a nation dedicated to securing its citizens’ unalienable rights — the rights inherent in all human beings — persevered for 250 years. Notwithstanding the social and political turmoil currently roiling the nation, America has done much more than persevere.

The American journey from 1776 to 2026 has been marked by the struggle to honor more fully the Declaration’s promise of equality in fundamental rights.

No multireligious, multiracial, and multiethnic nation-state in history has more successfully established freedom and equality under law, promoted economic prosperity, and developed the capabilities to defend itself by projecting military power around the world.

America’s perseverance and flourishing — as presidents including Abraham Lincoln, Calvin Coolidge, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt have affirmed and as venerable reformers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr. have demonstrated — owe much to the nation’s founding on universal principles and to its enduring dedication to them.

Unchanging principles

The self-evident truths proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence start with the conviction that human beings are by nature free and equally endowed with unalienable rights. They include the belief that government’s first purpose is to secure citizens’ unalienable rights, that just power stems from the consent of the governed, and that citizens by right may replace a government that destroys the conditions for securing their unalienable rights.

These universal principles inform the 27 grievances — abuses of executive power, lawless legislation, and acts of war — that the Declaration spells out against King George III and the British Parliament. Some argue that the Declaration’s primary significance lies in these grievances and downplay the historic document’s opening paragraphs about universal principles as Enlightenment commonplaces. But it was revolutionary for a people to claim the authority of unalienable rights to throw off one form of government and institute another.

Indeed, according to the Declaration’s logic, American colonists’ specific grievances justified their break with Britain and the establishment of free and independent states because taken together the grievances violated rights that the colonists shared equally with all persons.

In recent years, critics on both left and right have subjected the truths that the Declaration holds to be self-evident to harsh criticism. Eminent figures associated with the postmodern-progressive left accuse these principles of obscuring if not empowering the evil institution of slavery. Prominent members of the postliberal right charge that the Declaration’s self-evident truths are neither true nor beneficial but rather constitute the chief source of the multifarious maladies afflicting the nation.

RELATED: 1776, not 1608: What the Supreme Court got wrong on birthright citizenship

Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call Inc./Getty Images

Whereas postmodern progressives blame those principles for the perpetuation of systemic racism, postliberals condemn them for the systemic degradation of men and women of all religions, races, and ethnicities.

Both find in the Declaration’s affirmation of universal rights a baleful pretext for colonizing foreign countries and imposing America’s ways and rules on other peoples and nations. And both indulge extravagant speculations about establishing new forms of government in the United States untainted by the basic rights and fundamental freedoms promised by the Declaration.

The American journey from 1776 to 2026 has been marked by the struggle to honor more fully the Declaration’s promise of equality in fundamental rights. America has benefited from a common language; abundant natural resources; vast, protective oceans to the east and west; peaceful and stable borders to the north and south for much of its history; and a moral and political heritage entwining biblical faith, classical thought, and the modern tradition of freedom.

At the same time, America has been compelled to grapple with the legal institutionalization of slavery and, after the Union’s victory in the Civil War and the subsequent ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, slavery’s poisonous legacy; to wage war abroad repeatedly; and to reckon with the constant churn and turbulence generated by free peoples and free markets.

The decline of patriotism

American citizens’ appreciation of this complex, rocky, and inspiring journey is waning. The nation’s educational system bears heavy responsibility for the diminished understanding of the American experiment in ordered liberty and for the popularity of extreme criticism emerging from both sides of the political spectrum. All levels of the American educational system have been derelict in their duties. But higher education is especially to blame because it also trains K-12 teachers.

American colleges and universities advance the public interest in a variety of ways. They furnish pre-professional and professional education. They provide a credentialing service for employers. They train scholars. They conduct vital scientific research. And, not least, they offer liberal education.

Liberal education is the least successful part of higher education. In recent years, reformers have justly focused on colleges’ and universities’ impairment of free speech and imposition of ideological monocultures. The corruption of the curriculum also deserves scrutiny.

In most cases, colleges and universities believe themselves to comply with the imperatives of liberal education by requiring students to fulfill distribution requirements. Rarely do the nation’s leading institutions of higher education mandate courses that all students must complete or identify substantive bodies of knowledge that all students must master.

The application of a method designed to account for matter in motion has been decidedly less successful in illuminating the moral and political world.

Instead, students meet their obligations by taking a few courses in the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences, often picking and choosing among dozens of offerings if not more in each of the three main divisions. Two students can fulfill their distribution requirements without reading a single book in common. This, from our colleges’ and universities’ point of view, is not a problem but rather a source of pride.

They believe that they demonstrate concern for students’ individuality by allowing them to choose their own courses and design their own curricula. At the same time, by exposing students to a variety of disciplines and approaches to knowledge, institutions of higher education claim to produce open-minded and well-rounded graduates expertly trained to lead in changing the world.

The traditional aim of liberal education is to cultivate students capable of thoughtfully exercising the rights and discharging the responsibilities of freedom. However, far from exemplifying liberal education at its finest, colleges and universities typically betray it by failing to structure the curriculum coherently, to give it suitable content, and to ensure that students master contending arguments.

Few students these days receive an organized, historically informed introduction to American ideas and institutions: the nation’s religious and political inheritance, founding principles, constitutional traditions, cultural crosscurrents, economic arrangements, and diplomatic and national-security requirements. Few students examine the great books and seminal events of the larger Western tradition out of which the United States emerged and to which it has made a decisive contribution.

Few students undertake the serious study of other peoples and nations, which is essential to a proper assessment of America’s achievements and failings. And few students have impressed upon them the importance in studying morality and politics of appreciating the strong points of the arguments with which they disagree.

The problem of higher education

America’s colleges and universities have debased liberal education under the compulsion of three ideals. One is political. A second is methodological. A third is professional. When suitably refined, each is worthy. However, contemporary academic life has radicalized all three to the great detriment of liberal education.

First, contrary to liberal education’s imperatives, many faculty members believe that their job is to instill correct views about the pursuit of social justice and enlist students in the cause of progressive political transformation.

Liberal education in America should not be neutral toward fundamental political principles: It assumes the goodness of individual freedom and human equality. But to prepare students for freedom and democratic self-government, liberal education must both refrain from treating partisan political views as academic orthodoxies and foster appreciation of contending opinions and competing ideas.

Yet many of today’s classroom crusaders recognize no pedagogical duty to present fairly the other side of the argument. Some believe themselves obliged to ignore, dismiss, or deride views — often despite little conscientious exploration of them and regardless of their historical significance and relevance to contemporary politics — that they deem distasteful, demeaning, or destructive.

They are unaware of or unmoved by John Stuart Mill’s indispensable observation in “On Liberty” that a person “who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”

RELATED: America’s classrooms are feeding the red wave — socialist red

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Second, contrary to liberal education’s imperatives, many faculty members in the social sciences believe that the scientific method represents the one true approach to understanding. While the application of the scientific method to the natural world since the 17th century has produced astounding increases in knowledge and know-how, the application of a method designed to account for matter in motion has been decidedly less successful in illuminating the moral and political world inhabited by self-interpreting human beings.

The conduct of moral and political animals, whose beliefs are shaped by custom, experience, reason, interests, and passions and whose actions are informed by fallible judgments about right and wrong, cannot be fully captured by methods designed to describe matter in motion.

Nevertheless, setbacks in illuminating morality and politics have only driven many social scientists to double down on the study of method. Mesmerized by techniques for counting, measuring, and weighing and transfixed by elegant theories for describing rational conduct, they churn out mounds of research that shroud the substance and texture of human affairs.

Political scientists’ bewitchment by method produces disciplines that have less and less to say to citizens about self-government and justice as they elaborate more and more mathematically sophisticated approaches to the study of moral and political life.

And third, contrary to the imperatives of liberal education, many professors operate on the assumption that the purpose of educating undergraduates is to train the next generation of scholars.

Instead of transmitting to students the knowledge about America, the West, and the world needed for good citizenship, professors commonly provide intellectual tools and socialization into the sensibility required to succeed in the professoriate, though the vast majority of students have no intention of pursuing the scholarly life.

Curricula that honored the imperatives of liberal education would put the Declaration of Independence at the core. They would expose students to serious study of the constitutional system that institutionalized the Declaration’s fundamental principles and of the nation-defining political struggles to realize them. They would explore the seminal ideas and major events of Western civilization of which the American experiment in ordered liberty forms a crucial chapter. And they would examine the culture, economic system, language, politics, and religious beliefs of other civilizations, without which a well-rounded assessment of the United States is impossible.

Not least among the costs of colleges’ and universities’ betrayal of liberal education is that it produces graduates ignorant of the Declaration of Independence’s enduring principles and inspiring legacy and oblivious to the costs of that ignorance to themselves and the nation.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

​American founders, Declaration of independence, Unalienable rights, Higher education, Founding fathers, Postliberals, Progressives, Socialists, K-12 education, Teachers, Opinion & analysis 

Every July Fourth, announcers retell the same origin story before Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest: In 1916, four immigrants on Coney Island settled an argument over who was the most patriotic American by seeing who could eat the most hot dogs in 12 minutes. James Mullen, an Irish immigrant, won with 13.

It never happened.

‘A hot dog is like a pop idol. Hot dogs are cute.’

The story was invented in the early 1970s by two Nathan’s press agents, Max Rosey and Mortimer Matz, who needed a brand-new publicity stunt to make the contest look like a decades-old American tradition.

In 2010, Matz admitted to the New York Times: “In Coney Island pitchman style, we made it up.” A Nathan’s spokesman later confirmed the company “had no evidence of the contest” before Matz and Rosey got involved.

The fabrication came well embellished. The dates weren’t even fixed yet — early contests popped up near Memorial Day, Labor Day, and once in April. Some versions of the legend cast entertainer Jimmy Durante as a competitor, judged by Eddie Cantor and Sophie Tucker.

According to a former president of Nathan’s, the real first contest happened in 1972. “We’d honestly wait for a couple of fat guys to walk by and ask them if they wanted to be in a hot dog contest,” said Wayne Norbitz, who served as president for 26 years.

RELATED: ‘Alarming violence’ leads community to cancel Fourth of July celebration ahead of America’s 250th anniversary

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Nathan’s still markets the event as an unbroken tradition dating back to 1916. It’s a strange irony for a holiday built around an honest declaration.

Six-time champion Takeru Kobayashi, known as “The Tsunami,” was once asked point-blank whether a hot dog counts as a sandwich.

“No! No. You have to have a lot of respect for hot dogs. It’s completely different. First of all, the hot dog is American. Sandwiches are not American. They’re different. Second of all, a hot dog is like a pop idol. Hot dogs are cute. It’s a pop image — everyone knows what a hot dog is.”

Anthony Bourdain called the bun “a ballistic delivery system” and warned that ordering a “hot dog sandwich” at any respectable stand would get you reported to the FBI. The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council agrees, officially classifying the hot dog as its own category rather than a subtype of sandwich.

Maybe the only thing more mythical than Nathan’s 1916 origin story is the idea that anyone has actually settled what a hot dog is.

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​Coney island, Immigrants, July 4th, Labor day, Long island, Politics 

Most Americans know the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Few know the tune wasn’t written for America at all.

The melody Francis Scott Key used was the popular English tune “To Anacreon in Heaven,” originally the constitutional song of the Anacreontic Society, a gentlemen’s music club in London.

The next time you bail on the high note at a ball game or a July 4 cookout, don’t blame your lungs.

The club met regularly for a formal concert, dinner, and social time during which members entertained each other with songs. Its 1780 membership included peers, commoners, aldermen, gentlemen, actors, and tradesmen.

Although it is often described as a “drinking song,” the song was not a barroom ballad — it was convivial, but in a special and stately way. The verses were sung by a solo singer, with the entire society joining in only on the refrain.

When Key wrote his lyrics on September 14, 1814, after watching the British attack Fort McHenry during the War of 1812, he wasn’t composing original music — he was setting new words to a tune Americans would have instantly recognized.

RELATED: Whitlock blasts Victor Wembanyama for flagrantly disrespecting national anthem in NBA finals

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He wasn’t the first American to do it. By 1798, many new songs had already been set to the melody, including “Adams and Liberty,” a patriotic song in praise of the nation’s second president. By 1820, 84 sets of lyrics had been written to it in the United States alone.

The tune’s origins also explain a common modern complaint: The anthem is famously difficult to sing. It was intended for solo performance by an experienced vocalist — never designed for mass singing.

The composer’s identity was itself a mystery for generations. John Stafford Smith was identified as the writer of the original tune only in the 1970s, when a librarian in the music division of the Library of Congress tracked him down.

So the next time you bail on the high note at a ball game or a July 4 cookout, don’t blame your lungs. Blame an 18th-century London music club that never expected anyone outside its dining room to try.

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​Blaze news, Censors, Fourth of july, Francis scott key, Library of congress, Politics, Star-spangled banner 

A century ago in Philadelphia, July 5, 1926, Calvin Coolidge gave America the speech it needed on its 150th birthday. He did not flatter the country. He did not scold it. He reminded Americans that the Declaration was not a museum piece or a political slogan, but a spiritual document rooted in permanent truths. On our 250th birthday, his warning looks less like history than prophecy. Read this excerpt slowly. Then ask whether we still believe it. Editor’s note: This excerpt has been edited and condensed.

We meet to celebrate the birthday of America. The coming of a new life always excites our interest. Although we know in the case of the individual that it has been an infinite repetition reaching back beyond our vision, that only makes it the more wonderful. But how our interest and wonder increase when we behold the miracle of the birth of a new nation. It is to pay our tribute of reverence and respect to those who participated in such a mighty event that we annually observe the 4th day of July.

Whatever may have been the impression created by the news which went out from this city on that summer day in 1776, there can be no doubt as to the estimate which is now placed upon it. At the end of 150 years, the four corners of the earth unite in coming to Philadelphia as to a holy shrine in grateful acknowledgment of a service so great, which a few inspired men here rendered to humanity, that it is still the preeminent support of free government throughout the world.

No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.

It is not so much, then, for the purpose of undertaking to proclaim new theories and principles that this annual celebration is maintained, but rather to reaffirm and reestablish those old theories and principles which time and the unerring logic of events have demonstrated to be sound.

Amid all the clash of conflicting interests, amid all the welter of partisan politics, every American can turn for solace and consolation to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States with the assurance and confidence that those two great charters of freedom and justice remain firm and unshaken. Whatever perils appear, whatever dangers threaten, the Nation remains secure in the knowledge that the ultimate application of the law of the land will provide an adequate defense and protection.

It was not because it was proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles, that July 4, 1776, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history.

Great ideas do not burst upon the world unannounced. They are reached by a gradual development over a length of time usually proportionate to their importance. This is especially true of the principles laid down in the Declaration of Independence. Three very definite propositions were set out in its preamble regarding the nature of mankind and therefore of government. These were the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed.

If this apprehension of the facts be correct, and the documentary evidence would appear to verify it, then certain conclusions are bound to follow. A spring will cease to flow if its source be dried up; a tree will wither if it roots be destroyed. In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions.

Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man — these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world. Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We can not continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause.

We are too prone to overlook another conclusion. Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws that creates the character of a nation.

RELATED: 1776, not 1608: What the Supreme Court got wrong on birthright citizenship

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About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern.

But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.

Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

No other theory is adequate to explain or comprehend the Declaration of Independence. It is the product of the spiritual insight of the people. We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren scepter in our grasp.

If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshipped.

​Calvin coolidge, Declaration of independence, Opinion & analysis, Philadelphia, America 250, Equality, Freedom, Tyranny, Religion, Inalienable rights 

When most think of the Statue of Liberty, they picture her halo-like crown — the seven rays symbolizing a beacon of hope to the rest of the world. Or they think of the torch held aloft in her right hand, a representation of enlightenment and liberty lighting the way to freedom and progress.

But as our nation nears its 250th birthday this Independence Day, many Americans still overlook one of her most powerful symbols: the broken chain and shackle partially hidden under the hem of her flowing robes.

This chain and shackle, says Glenn Beck, represent a crucial piece of the American identity.

In this powerful monologue, Glenn takes us beyond the usual symbols to reveal the profound story hidden at the Statue of Liberty’s feet — and what it truly means to be an American patriot.

“France didn’t give [the Statue of Liberty] to us because they liked us. They were fighting Marxism in their own country, and they were trying to show America has the best idea,” Glenn recounts.

The reason for the broken chain and shackle around her foot, he explains, is to show that America “broke the chain of slavery.”

“And how did we do it?” Glenn asks. “Here’s a tip: With what’s in her [left] hand.”

In Lady Liberty’s left hand sits a rectangular tablet inscribed with “JULY IV MDCCLXXVI” — July 4, 1776, in Roman numerals. It represents the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and emphasizes that liberty rests on principles of law and order.

The idea of “independence” and that “all men are created equal” is what “breaks the chain of slavery,” Glenn exclaims.

“And what makes man man? The ability to invent, the ability to dream, the ability to do. That’s the torch!” he continues.

Put them all together, and you get a striking picture of what America is and who she is for: the “free man … under the law” who can turn “dreams” into reality and thus “light the entire world.”

Believing in this is what true patriotism is about.

“Patriotism is not about red hats. It’s not about waving flags or chanting slogans at rallies. It’s not about God bless the USA. It’s not about any of that stuff,” says Glenn, calling these surface-level expressions “sugar highs.”

“Real patriotism is deeper. … It’s the steady, bone-deep love of the country that raised you even when it didn’t get things right.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

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​Glenn beck, The glenn beck program 

On the night of July 4, 1776, as delegates of the Continental Congress dispersed into the Philadelphia darkness, a printer named John Dunlap got to work.

The assignment was urgent. Congress had just approved the Declaration of Independence and needed copies immediately. Through the night, Dunlap and his assistants set type and printed roughly 200 broadsides carrying the astonishing news that Britain’s American colonies had declared themselves free and independent states.

By early 1778, copies of the Declaration were being debated in Parliament itself.

These first printings were never intended to become museum pieces. They were meant to travel — by horseback, by ship, and by express rider — to army camps, city squares, and eventually, to foreign governments whose support the fledgling republic desperately needed. Some were pinned to walls and read aloud to soldiers. Others were folded, carried, and eventually discarded.

Most were lost, damaged, or simply thrown away.

In enemy hands

Just 26 of the original Dunlap broadsides are known to survive. One of them took an especially unlikely journey.

Barely five weeks after it rolled off Dunlap’s press, the document fell into British hands. Captured during the Revolutionary War and sent back across the Atlantic, it arrived in London accompanied by a dispatch from Vice Admiral Richard Howe and General William Howe, the brothers leading Britain’s military campaign in North America.

The Howes occupied an unusual position. They were not only commanders tasked with defeating the rebellion but also King George III’s peace commissioners, charged with seeking some form of reconciliation with the colonies. Ironically, they were among the last senior British officials who still believed the breach might be repaired. Lord Howe would later suggest that, had his peace commission arrived only days earlier, independence might have been avoided.

Instead, it was the Howes themselves who sent London one of the first printed copies of the Declaration of Independence, informing ministers that the colonists had declared themselves “absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown.”

A decisive break

For many on both sides of the conflict, the Declaration marked a decisive break. The quarrel with the colonies had become something altogether different: the birth of a new nation.

In that sense, this was the copy that told Britain the American crisis had entered an entirely new phase.

Now, nearly 250 years later, that same sheet of paper is on display as the centerpiece of the America 250 celebrations at the American Museum and Gardens in Bath.

The broadside’s story has acquired another twist in recent years. Although it had long been held by Britain’s National Archives, it was only identified in 2009 as a surviving Dunlap Broadside, making it the most recently discovered of the 26 known copies.

RELATED: America’s founding is an inheritance purchased with blood; we owe it our remembrance

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Philadelphia freedom

More recently still, historians traced the document’s origins to Jonas Phillips, a Jewish merchant and patriot who lived just doors from John Dunlap’s Philadelphia print shop. Research suggests that Phillips mailed the broadside to his cousin and business partner in Amsterdam in hopes of spreading the news of American independence abroad.

To evade British searches, he enclosed a note written in Yiddish referring only to “a declaration of that whole country.” The precaution failed. The letter, the Declaration, and the accompanying papers were seized by the British and eventually filed away in government archives.

What survives, then, is not merely one of America’s founding texts but also a rare piece of wartime intelligence — a document that crossed an ocean, vanished into the British state papers, and remained hidden there for more than two centuries.

The annotations on the reverse are striking for their banality. Officials in the colonial secretary’s office simply logged the Declaration and its accompanying papers as part of the ordinary business of government. One of history’s most consequential political texts was processed like routine correspondence.

Talk of the town

Yet the document did not simply disappear into an archive. By early 1778, copies of the Declaration were being debated in Parliament itself. Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond, a leading critic of Lord North’s government, read portions of the text aloud in the House of Lords and argued that Britain might ultimately have no choice but to recognize American independence.

In that sense, the Declaration became more than an American founding document. It also became part of Britain’s own argument over the war and the future of its empire.

The document also illustrates the tyranny of distance in the eighteenth century. News from North America often took six to 10 weeks to reach Britain, and any instructions sent in response required an equally long journey back across the Atlantic. By the time officials in Whitehall learned of dramatic events in the colonies, those events had already become history.

​America at 250, Declaration of independence, Great britain 

Some movies impress you, and some entertain you. A very small number remind you why you are proud to be an American. They celebrate courage and patriotism and the undying frontier spirit of the American people. They understand that patriotism is not propaganda. It is affection for a place, gratitude for those who built it, and admiration for ordinary people who rise to extraordinary moments.

These 10 films span 50 years and many genres: Westerns, war epics, historical dramas, science fiction, aviation adventures, and action thrillers. They understand that patriotism is strongest when expressed through individuals who quietly do difficult things.

That may explain why audiences continue returning to them. They do not merely entertain. They remind us of the people we hope we would become when history asks something difficult of us.

This is not a list of the greatest American films ever made. It is a list of 10 movies that understand the American character better than almost any others.

10. ‘Independence Day’ (1996)

Directed by Roland Emmerich

Few blockbusters have ever embraced unabashed American optimism with such infectious fun. The premise is straightforward: Humanity faces annihilation by an alien invasion, and the United States ends up leading the resistance, because of course we would. Together with a ragtag group of scientists, fighter pilots, immigrants, drunks, and the president, they all find common cause. Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith turn in incredibly charismatic performances.

The film’s famous presidential speech has become part of American popular culture because it appeals to something larger than nationalism. It celebrates the belief that free people, when cornered, refuse to surrender. It is loud, funny, unapologetically sentimental, and surprisingly sincere.

9. ‘Air Force One’ (1997)

Directed by Wolfgang Petersen

Harrison Ford understood something many action stars forgot: A hero becomes interesting only when he is willing to sacrifice something.

As President James Marshall, Ford gives us an American commander in chief who is less politician than a reluctant cowboy. Terrorists seize the presidential aircraft, and rather than escape to safety, he stays behind to rescue his family, his staff, and his country.

The movie is gloriously implausible. That hardly matters. Petersen directs with absolute confidence, and Ford’s quiet determination grounds every impossible moment. When the terrorists seize Air Force One remains one of the best staged action scenes ever filmed. The result is one of Hollywood’s great star vehicles.

8. ‘The Patriot’ (2000)

Directed by Roland Emmerich

History professors have spent years debating the liberties this film takes with the American Revolution. Fair enough. But movies are not textbooks.

Mel Gibson plays Benjamin Martin as a man who desperately wants peace but discovers that peace sometimes requires terrible violence. The film captures something timeless about the Revolution: ordinary farmers becoming soldiers because they decide some principles cannot be negotiated away.

Its emotional center is family and what men are willing to do to save the ones they love. Just don’t come between Mel Gibson wielding an axe and his son.

7. ‘Jeremiah Johnson’ (1972)

Directed by Sydney Pollack

Some movies whisper instead of shout.

Sydney Pollack’s mountain epic is among the finest American Westerns ever made because it kicks melodrama to the curb in exchange for raw. Robert Redford disappears into the Rockies, learning that nature rewards patience while punishing arrogance.

The landscape becomes another character. Mountains are magnificent but indifferent. Civilization feels impossibly distant. Johnson survives through competence, resilience, and quiet determination.

Few films understand self-reliance so completely.

6. ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ (2022)

Directed by Joseph Kosinski

Sequels rarely are worth your time. This one is the rare one that is better than the original.

Tom Cruise returned not to relive the 1980s but to remind audiences why practical filmmaking still matters. The flying sequences possess genuine weight because real aircraft performed real maneuvers. Every dive and climb has physical consequence, and you can see it in every frame.

More importantly, “Maverick” celebrates American excellence. It argues that mastery comes only from discipline, repetition, and experience. In an era fascinated with irony, the film believes competence is heroic. Audiences responded by making it one of the defining theatrical experiences of its generation.

5. ‘Gettysburg’ (1993)

Directed by Ronald F. Maxwell

Four and a half hours can feel intimidating until you realize this film never wastes your attention.

Based on Michael Shaara’s “The Killer Angels,” “Gettysburg” treats both Union and Confederate soldiers as complicated human beings trapped inside history’s greatest American tragedy. The performances possess uncommon dignity, particularly those of Tom Berenger as James Longstreet and Jeff Daniels as Joshua Chamberlain.

Rather than glorifying battle, Maxwell reveals its terrible cost. Heroism exists alongside exhaustion, confusion, and grief. The result remains perhaps the finest Civil War film ever made.

4. ‘Apollo 13’ (1995)

Directed by Ron Howard

The most exciting lines in the movie are not shouted. They are spoken calmly by engineers surrounded by coffee cups, slide rules, and impossible deadlines.

“Apollo 13” is a celebration of these brilliant men.

Ron Howard understands that intelligence can be cinematic. Watching engineers solve one impossible problem after another becomes more thrilling than almost any gunfight. Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton, Ed Harris, and Gary Sinise create an ensemble defined by professionalism.

The movie reminds us that America once solved enormous problems because thousands of ordinary experts quietly refused to fail.

3. ‘True Grit’ (2010)

Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen

The Coen brothers respected Charles Portis enough to trust his words. What results is a superior movie to the previous John Wayne version.

Jeff Bridges gives Rooster Cogburn tremendous personality, but the film truly belongs to Hailee Steinfeld’s Mattie Ross. Her determination never feels modern or revisionist. It feels timeless. She believes promises matter. Justice matters. Character matters.

Roger Deakins photographs the frontier as both beautiful and unforgiving, while Carter Burwell’s score lends every scene a mournful grandeur.

This is less a Western than an American morality play.

2. ‘Saving Private Ryan’ (1998)

Directed by Steven Spielberg

The Omaha Beach sequence changed war movies forever.

Spielberg strips combat of glamour without stripping soldiers of honor. Every explosion is awful because every death belongs to someone. Tom Hanks gives perhaps the defining performance of his career as Captain Miller, a schoolteacher tasked with an almost impossible mission.

The film asks what one human life is worth. It never fully answers the question, because perhaps no answer exists. Instead, it argues that sacrifice creates obligations for those who survive.

Few films have honored the generation that fought the Second World War with such honesty.

1. ‘Red Dawn’ (1984)

Directed by John Milius

John Milius understood myth better than almost anyone working in Hollywood.

“Red Dawn” imagines an occupied America where high school students become guerrilla fighters. The premise is fantastical. The emotions are not.

The Wolverines are frightened kids forced into adulthood overnight. They fight because their homes have been taken from them. They lose friends, family, and eventually themselves. Milius never suggests war is glamorous. He suggests freedom is expensive.

The film became a cultural touchstone because it speaks to something deeply American: the conviction that liberty belongs to ordinary citizens as much as to armies or governments. Patrick Swayze gives the performance that anchors the entire story, balancing youthful confidence with quiet despair.

Viewed today, “Red Dawn” feels almost old-fashioned in the best possible sense. It assumes courage exists. It assumes sacrifice matters. It assumes some causes are worth defending even when victory seems impossible. WOLVERINES. WOLVERINES.

​Best movies, Lifestyle, Culture, Entertainment, July 4th