My friends, I hope your 250th Independence Day was everything it should've been — flags flying, fireworks lighting up the sky, family and friends celebrating the most remarkable experiment in self-government the world has ever seen.

Here's something I want you to sit with for a second. The left loves to rail against "the one percent" — like being wealthy or successful is some kind of moral failing. But here's the truth nobody on the left wants to say out loud: if you're alive in America in 2026, you already are the one percent. Not because of your bank account. Because of the sheer blessing of being born or living here, in the freest, most prosperous nation in the history of the world. We have it better than 99 percent of every human being who has ever walked this planet. That's not something to apologize for. That's something to be grateful for.

Which is exactly why Zohran Mamdani's Fourth of July weekend speech bothered me so much. New York City's communist mayor stood up and told the country that "American exceptionalism" is a myth invented by the powerful to keep everyone else in their place — that this country has mostly been a story of people being told they weren't good enough, weren't the "best," didn't belong.

Here's where he's got it backwards. America was never exceptional because we're smarter or better than anyone else. We're exceptional because our Founders built a country on the idea that every single person — rich or poor, Puritan or atheist — is made in the image of God, and that when government gets out of the way, that image-bearing potential gets to flourish. That's the whole idea. Rights don't come from Washington. They come from our Creator. Government answers to us — not the other way around.

Mamdani wants you to believe exceptionalism means some people were told they mattered and others weren't. I want you to see it for what it actually is: the radical idea that everybody matters, and everybody gets a shot, when government simply steps back. Nearly nine out of every ten American millionaires are first-generation. That's not an accident of superiority. That's what happens when you let free people be free.

So no, I won't apologize for loving this country at 250. I love this country. And I know you do, too. 🇺🇸

Conservative, not bitter.
Todd

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Every government in human history before ours told the people what they were allowed to do. Our Founders flipped that script entirely — they said government answers to the people, and that our rights come from God, not from Washington. That's not a slogan. That's the whole American experiment in one sentence.

Zohran Mamdani's America 250 speech this weekend is a case study in forgetting that. He frames exceptionalism as something handed down by the powerful to some and withheld from others — as though greatness is a permission slip issued by government. It isn't. It never was. The Founders' radical claim was that greatness is already inside every person because they're made in the image of God, and government's primary job is to secure citizens’ rights and then get out of the way and let liberty flourish.

I've talked before about a professor I once had who simply couldn't fathom the idea that government shouldn't be involved in any aspect of society. That instinct — "surely the government should handle this" — is exactly the instinct our Founders built this country to resist. Register. Vote. Show up to your local school board or county commissioner meeting. That's how citizens — not subjects — keep the answer to "who answers to whom" pointed in the right direction.

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