Over the Fourth of July weekend, Matthew Peterson, Blaze Media editor in chief and co-host of “Blaze News: The Mandate,” celebrated true Americanism by attending the Claremont Institute’s 2025 Statesmanship Award ceremony, which honored Vice President JD Vance.
“This is an award they don’t give out every year because, as you may surmise … there aren’t a lot of statesmen out there,” says Peterson, who’s long been associated with the Claremont Institute. “So the Statesmanship Award is a special one, and the fact that they gave it to the vice president, JD Vance, who is so young in his career, is notable.”
During his keynote speech, Vance beautifully defined what it means to be an American and warned what will happen if we lose sight of this definition.
“American citizenship must mean belonging to a nation that guards the sovereignty of its people, especially from a modern world that’s hellbent on dissolving borders and differences in national character,” he said. “That means having a government that vigorously defends the basic qualities of sovereignty, that secures the border from foreign invasion, that protects its citizens and their enterprises against unfair foreign tax schemes, that erects tariff walls and similar barriers to protect its people’s industry, that avoids needlessly entangling them in prolonged distant wars.”
“It also means preserving the basic legal privileges of citizenship — things like voting, including in state and local elections, or access to benefits, like certain state-run health care programs for citizens,” he continued, noting that “most of the howling about the Big Beautiful Bill reduces to the fundamental fact that President Trump believes that Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security ought to go to the American people, not to illegal aliens.”
“When states … start handing out these benefits to illegal aliens, they cheapen the very meaning of citizenship, and a nation that refuses to make that distinction will not stay a nation for very long,” he warned.
However, he clarified that citizenship isn’t just about what Americans get; it’s also about what they give.
“Citizenship in the 21st century necessarily means building. … Our ancestors realized that to carve a successful nation from new land meant creating new tangible things — new homes, new towns, new infrastructure — to tame a wild continent. That is our heritage as Americans,” he said, noting that this American innovation not only blossomed here in the United States, it spread across the globe.
“Our innovations — American innovations — revolutionized communications, medicine, and agriculture, extending human lifespan decades at a time, and none of that would be possible if our citizens believed we lived in a postindustrial era.”
Sadly, there are many today who believe that very thing — that we live in a time of irreversible decline in American manufacturing and industry.
Vance made it clear that he rejects this notion.
“The 21st century is a time to build. We need to make great things here for the betterment of our fellow Americans but also for our posterity. We need to continue to invent groundbreaking innovations and to leave homes and libraries and factories that our descendants will look at someday and feel a sense of awe,” he encouraged.
However, if we want to get back to this place of American building, our nation needs to return to being the kind of place where creators and dreamers can thrive. “Getting to the moon required a lot of brilliant scientists” and “very talented engineers and welders and custodians,” but “it also required a national system of education that produced that level of genius, that fostered that level of genius, that inspired young graduates to look to the stars and want to go there on behalf of their nation,” said Vance.
“To be a citizen in the 21st century must mean that we should be thinking about the future in similar ways and building similar projects as an American family,” he said, clarifying that this can be done without “importing millions and millions of low-wage surfs,” contrary to what “Democrat politicians” and “corporate oligarchs” argue.
“We can do it with American citizens. We’ve just got to have the will to actually try.”
To hear more of Vance’s speech and the Blaze News panel’s analysis, watch the video above.
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