A few weeks ago, I gave a speech at a local conservative group, this is that speech:
I'm a journalist now and work with a lot of great reporters and pundits but his wasn't always my life. I started out wanting to be a writer in my teen years, went on to study writing, theater, philosophy, and great books. I wrote plays. I went to a liberal arts college and then onto an Ivy League art school (which trust me, that should not be a thing), and made a career in theater in New York City doing mostly independent work in the little spaces that dot the downtown arts landscape.
Then I spoke out about trans, not just in satirical plays, but in the pages of conservative media outlets and everything changed overnight.
Now I'm an editor and writer living in West Virginia. But the change isn't as stark as it seems, and in looking back, I see a clear through-line that has guided me to the point where I am today, to being a homeowner, a mother, and embodying the patriotism that has always been with me.
I'm not sure if you want to hear my story, but I have a feeling that my story is very much like your story.
I grew up in America, in a small town near a big city. I heard from my parents, teachers, and even media that America was the greatest country in the world. And I believed it.
We said things like Democracy is the worst system of government except for all the rest.
We believed that Democrats, Republicans, and everyone in between wanted the best for our country, for our future, and thought that there was nothing our nation couldn't achieve.
We thought we all had the same goals, but just had different ideas on the best path to take to achieve them.
It was the 1980s, everything was shoulder pads and new wave, I had fluorescent socks. I'd ride my bike until the sun went down then speed back home to set the table for dinner.
At a Fourth of July one year my town burned an effigy of Muamar Gaddafi and everyone cheered.
We were the good guys, we were doing the work of democracy—or something, we weren't entirely sure, but we did know we were right, or at least more right than anyone else.
Being big, mighty, strong, and yes, exceptional are foundational components of Americanness. These are key aspects of what it means to be us. As a kid, I swam in waters of an American culture that was steadfast and sure that we were the best nation to ever exist. Better than England at the height of her colonial powers, better than Rome even as they built roads across Europe. We were America, the strong, the proud, the free.
Anyone who dared tread on us, we figured, would f*ck around and find out.
We had a good thing going. And then we started to hate ourselves.
For sure, the self-hatred had been boiling for years. Peggy McIntosh shared her notion of privilege with her "Invisible Knapsack" in 1989 and it quickly made its way through the institutions.
The idea blossomed that America was somehow the worst place to live ever and that white people, and men, were a huge part of the problem.
Post-9/11 we somehow victim blamed ourselves and begged the terrorists to love us. And as we did so, even our global allies began to hate us. They have no qualms at all in the UK or Europe in slandering us, and we're just supposed to accept it.
September 11, 2001 ushered in a brief wave of patriotism, followed by an intense period of self-hatred that still undermines American liberty and national pride. We are a self-hating nation, and it all began in the months following that fateful, sunny blue Tuesday.
We knew who hated us, and that awareness let us know, too, who we were. We were a nation of people who rushed into crumbling buildings in hopes of saving someone, anyone who needed it. We were a nation of people who rushed to hospitals to give blood even when there weren't enough victims to take it. We were a nation of people who were proud to be American, who knew that we had been hit hard, but that we were resilient enough to withstand it, and to hit back.
That's when things got confusing. The narrative began changing, and instead of American heroes, we became American villains who had brought this on ourselves. Suddenly, the message was that the Islamic terrorists who took our lives and national security were entitled to do it; that we were the cause of their hate; that it was we who should repent, atone, and seek forgiveness. We were supposed to ignore the fact that those men who turned our commercial jetliners and civilians into bombs were doing so in the name of their god; out of hatred for us.
America, and Americans, the message went, were to blame. We were the ones our media, academics and progressive elites held responsible for being attacked. Would any of these people or institutions tell a woman she was at fault for being beaten? Tell a child they were at fault for being bullied? No, but when it came to their own nation, they could see no other reality than that we had asked for it, and gotten what we deserved.
We promised to change, to become more globally compliant, we taught our kids these new lessons of self-hatred and self-harm and now we wonder why they all think we suck.
We undertook decades of war in foreign lands to exterminate terrorists only for the Biden administration to start letting them in, en masse, so they could hate us right here at home.
Textbook and academic publishers sought to remake out historical records to say that Christianity was as violent as Islam and to blame Christians for the ills of the world.
Conservatives knew it wasn't true, but also ceded the cultural realm to leftists who perpetrated this in schools, libraries, non-profits, museums, universities, and even in government agencies that went out into the world to spread not democracy but anti-Americanism, abortion, LGBTQ propaganda, and a secularist relativism that dehumanizes all of us and equivocates cultures so that one cannot tell good from bad or right from wrong.
Perhaps when Trump came along in 2016 those who hated him didn't hate him so much for his own self or policies but for what he believed about America.
We are a great nation, he said, and when he said he would make America great again what he really meant is that we would believe it.
If we believe it, if we will it, it is no dream.
Like you, I have always loved this country.
The United States is the last bastion of western civilization. We are here to preserve and further the mission that began with the Greeks and Romans, moved on to the Holy Roman Empire, into the era of the British empire, and landed on our Atlantic shores.
As we near our 250th anniversary, we have finally gotten to a point where America, and what it is to be an American, must be defined.
Every time I hear the missive that America is "an idea" I cringe.
Similarly when I hear the term "heritage American" it makes my skin crawl.
We are not like other nations where to be of it your blood must trace back in time to the land on which you stand.
We are a a nation founded on that amorphous concept of shared values, civility, and individual freedom. We are a country that must preserve more than a people or a scrap of land but an ethos. If anyone who comes here, or is born here, can be a citizen, then what does citizenship mean? Is it just a piece of paper? A meaningless oath? A way to access taxpayer funded benefits?
No. We are a people who have staked a claim to this land and no other. To be American is to have cast off any foreign ties. To be American is to have no other country to go home to.
Once we were from everywhere, with loyalties to the nations of our ancestors.
But now, no other country can claim us, and we can claim no other country as our own; that’s something to celebrate. When we travel outside our borders people can tell what we are and that is nothing at all to be ashamed of, far from it.
I was recently in an Uber in Fort Lauderdale and I got to talking with the driver, and he was like "yeah, y'know things aren't great, I'm thinking of moving back to Columbia."
I can't go any place, this is it, this is my last stand, it's my country. If you don't have a stake in this place, so deep that you have have cut off your foreign past and see only a future on these lands, among these people, with these founding documents as your own, then you are not American.
To be American is to own this place, to say from here no further, to stomp the terra of this land and refuse to be moved to anywhere else either physically or ideologically. If you can go back from whence you yourself or your ancestors came and be just as comfortable, just as secure in your ability to forge your own destiny, then this land is not your land.
I think I'm like many of you when I say that there's nowhere else I could call home, nowhere else I would call home. The fight we are facing is an existential one, and we must win it.
The demand by our commander-in-chief to lift up our countrymen, our country, our land, our people is long overdue after decades of cutting ourselves like some depressed, anorexic teen girl. I want a big, strong America, the one were were promised, and I wonder if that promise was always built on a strength so formidable that even our allies are afraid of us.
America is exceptional, there is no doubt of that. Making America great begins in our hearts and in many ways it ends there, too. If you don't believe in American greatness, in American superiority—not based on race, ethnicity, creed or any of the rest but based on our nation's founding, success, and demand for prosperity, are you really American?
The people who hate this nation must not be allowed to rule it. It's for us. For our kids. For those who believe that the best chance for humanity, freedom, their own liberty and pursuit of happiness lie nowhere else but upon these shores.
To be honest that's how I ended up in West Virginia. I packed my bags from the great north east that I've always called home and found a foothold here where I thought the American Dream still lives. And this is a shockingly beautiful place, with kind, determined, stubborn people who mind their business, which as a New Yorker and a New Englander I appreciate.
But even here, the tendrils of American self-hate have wrapped around the institutions and educational systems where we send our kids. I have found here what I thought I was escaping.
I want to remind us all to teach our children to be patriots in the truest sense, that we are not great in spite of our flaws but because of them, because of how we overcame them—and there is no shame in repentance and making right, that is something our Lord smiles upon.
As we face this our 250th year, let's embrace what it is to be American. It is to believe in ourselves against all odds, to be over confident, to be too loud, too brash, full of piss and vinegar, and to know for real and for true that this nation is worth defending, worth saving, and worth fighting for into the future.
