In 1776, a congress of colonials declared they had had enough of kings and priests claiming divine right over their lives. Rights come from the Creator, governments exist by consent, and their purpose is to secure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The founders knew slavery was immoral, but lacked a political mechanism to end it without fracturing the fragile union. They compromised, hoping the ideals would eventually outgrow the inherited sin. That tension became the engine of America’s long, painful self-correction.
The mechanism arrived through the Second Great Awakening. Americans taught to read from the Bible took the founders’ words seriously. Devout Christians led the abolitionist charge. It took a terrible Civil War to end legal slavery. The ideals had outstripped the compromise. Progress continued unevenly. Virginia Randolph and Inez Milholland, among other educators and suffragettes, helped secure the vote. Jesse Owens, the Tuskegee Airmen, Martin Luther King Jr., and countless others pushed the Overton window until America became the most tolerant, diverse nation on earth, precisely because no one is born to rule above a vote. Public servants must ask for another try every two, four, or six years.
Recommended Stories
This is the real red pill: not instant perfection, but a relentless, step-by-step awakening fueled by the belief that free people accountable to first principles can keep improving. Different populations have been shaped by cultural and selective pressures, genius, traits, and behaviors that can be nurtured or culled through choices in reproduction, education, and values. The incredible number of Jewish Nobel Prize winners and the consistent excellence of many Asian groups are powerful examples. But the American Ethos judges the individual, not the ancestry.
We are the shining city on a hill. The ethos of individual sovereignty, self-reliance, limited government, and the rule of law preceded our founding and produces confident individuals rather than dependent collectives. That model has always been a direct threat to systems that require submission and centralized control. Even if the COVID-19 virus escaped from a Wuhan laboratory by accident, the Chinese regime immediately turned it into a weapon, suppressing information, punishing doctors, expanding domestic control, and attacking the credibility of open societies. That response was predictable. Individual liberty and uncontrolled information are existential threats to authoritarian regimes.
The difference is most visible in the all-volunteer American warrior. Unlike conscript armies of subjects, the American soldier fights as a sovereign defending his own realm, the monarch protecting his family, home, and way of life. That is why Americans crossed a frozen river on Christmas Eve in small wooden boats to strike a superior force. Complementing the warrior is Rosie the Riveter, raising the next generation of fighters and building the arsenal that sustains them. Together, they represent the complete American model: the willingness to defend what we have built and the commitment to transmit those principles forward.
At 250, America should stop treating its founding principles as something we must apologize for or dilute. Those principles remain the most powerful civilizational technology yet developed. We did not make our revolution for you. We cannot morally make your revolution for you. We have emptied our coffers with good intentions, exporting wealth toward national defense abroad and supporting non-citizens at home. We are out of money and out of forever wars. To the collective of humanity that wants what we have: you are going to have to earn it. We’ve lit the beacon. You no longer need to come here. You can make America where you live.
If you are doomscrolling through life, feeding off someone else’s money, you are in the dopamine enslavement matrix. Get outside and do something useful with real people. Parents: take the screens away. Teach ABCs, money, math, cooking, fractions. Introduce books. Take them to church, especially when they don’t want to go. Learning to sit quietly and pay attention is a life skill. At breakfast, ask what they are planning. At dinner, ask what they did and what they learned. Raise your children to be the confident commanders of their own lives. It does not take a village. It takes a mother and a father who teach manners, sportsmanship, respect for property, and the serious nature of sovereignty and accountability. Don’t let unsupervised government raise your child.
The red pill is not a ticket to a free ride. It is the willingness to take responsibility for your own life and build. Imagine if all the energy poured into protest and grievance went instead into Habitat for Humanity, trail maintenance, and helping the vulnerable. We would be living about as close to utopia as humans ever get. Hold tight to heritage, culture, religion, and language where they work for you, but make sure they are working for you and not you for them.
OBAMA’S BIGGEST LIE: ‘YOU DIDN’T BUILD THAT’
“In the course of human events” has no expiration date unless the Cosmos does it to us or we do it to ourselves. A coronal mass ejection or an EMP could move large parts of the globe back to the pre-industrial age in microseconds. That vulnerability makes self-reliance and the Ethos even more urgent. The American Ethos remains history’s most potent weapon of mass construction because it rewards character and creativity over rigid hierarchy. The ideals were always bigger than the men who first held them. That is why it still offers redemption and real progress to anyone willing to swallow the pill and start building.
Let freedom ring from every mountainside, every molehill, and every valley until it echoes across this nation and around the world. Make America where your heart is, and you will be halfway there.
Michael Breeden is a retired Air Force chief master sergeant with 29 years of service as a combat controller in special operations. He writes on sovereignty, culture, and institutional accountability.
