Nathanael Miller, 05 January 2026
The United States reaches its 250th birthday this year.
Since 1776, we’ve gone from being a tiny, minor-league coastal republic to the greatest superpower ever seen in all of human history. We’ve expanded human rights more in the last 70 years alone than every civilization combined over the past 5,000 years (as measured by the creation of written language).
I’m marking our 250th by defending Western Culture, something that is long overdue. This doesn’t mean hiding our sins and shortcomings. No, it means that we do not define who and what we are simply by the bad, as so many anti-American Cultural Marxists want. We define ourselves by the good and the bad…and, guess what?
The good far outweighs the bad.
The first, and perhaps, most fundamental freedom Western Culture became the first to uphold is the freedom of speech. This juggernaut began during the Renaissance when scientific breakthroughs forced researchers to ask questions that the political and religious leaders didn’t want asked. By the late 17th century, the development of parliamentary governance and a constitutional monarchy in Britain began to formalize free speech as part of the “Rights of Englishmen.”
When our Founders rebelled against British tyranny (more on this in a future column), we took the next logical step. Having suffered under a government with no checks and balances, we did what had never been done in 5,000 years of human history: we designed a government from the ground up based on a written Constitution that couldn’t be easily changed based on the whims of the immediate moment. This written Constitution commanded the federal government to protect enumerated rights.
The Founding Fathers encoded free speech into the First Amendment of the new Constitution as they began working out the kinks. They saw free speech as the fundamental right upon which human freedom rests.
Think about it. Every totalitarian regime and revolution, successful or not, began by censoring speech and controlling what ideas the public was allowed to see. This censorship was done through criminalizing and severely punishing anyone who dared violate the censors. Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Communist China, Communist Cuba, Communist Venezuela, North Korea…they all began by forbidding certain speech.
We have fought this trend in our own nation, and I’m not talking about the legitimate tension between free speech and protecting necessarily classified or confidential information.
During the COVID pandemic, we were told masking was essential to stop the virus. When hard data from Europe and our own Centers for Disease Control emerged proving that masking was useless against an airborne pathogen like COVID, what happened? Those in control tried to censor the information because it threatened their political and cultural control. They punished speech.
Our nation was born from the trials, fires, triumphs, and foibles of Great Britain, and our written Constitution is the logical endpoint of the kind of constitutional parliamentary monarchy the U.K. has. Our very idea of free speech came from Britain.
However, today in 2026, British citizens are being arrested and prosecuted for simply hitting “like” on a social media post the government doesn’t like. British citizens are being arrested and prosecuted for speaking about basic biological facts, such as the reality that transwomen are mentally ill men suffering a tragic pathology…but are not women, even if they have to live as women in order to survive.
Go to Saudi Arabia or Indonesia, stand on a street corner, and loudly declare you support gay rights. I’m gay; if I did that, I’d get legally prosecuted at best, thrown off a roof, and killed at worst. A straight person would face…the same thing.
Go stand on a stage in Bahrain and declare that women have the right to vote, the right to own property, and the right to not wear grocery sacks covering them from head to toe, and see how long it is before you’re arrested and prosecuted.
Go to a restaurant in China and say that the Chinese Communist Party is using unwanted minorities and political dissidents for slave labor, and then hit the stopwatch button. I’m pretty sure you’ll be in custody and charged with a crime before the after-dinner coffee arrives.
Now, go stand on a stage here in Pensacola and say that President Trump is a Nazi, or that Joe Biden was a traitor who encouraged and abetted an invasion of our land. You’ll definitely get a reaction out of both sides of that debate, and it likely won’t be a very polite reaction, but you’ll be going home that night. You won’t be arrested, questioned, or charged with a crime.
Our Constitution. Our nation put this protection into the highest law in the land.
Saudi Arabia didn’t do it.
China didn’t do it.
Mexico didn’t do it.
Somalia sure as hell didn’t do.
Even Britain never did it.
The United States of America, a nation built from the foundations of Western Culture—we did it; we put it in writing that speech, even ugly speech, is protected by law.
Therefore, I present Exhibit A to support my claim that Western Culture in general, and our American culture, in particular, are superior; we Americans defied thousands of years of human political and cultural practices by granting near absolute legal protection to speech.
From that foundation eventually came the end of slavery, the right of women to vote, the right of us normal gays to live, marry, and be left the hell alone. From that foundation came such a free exchange of ideas that we Americans invented the airplane, created the polio vaccine, built the Panama Canal, and produced literary classics as deeply treasured as any European or Asian work ever was.
The United States is fast approaching its 250th birthday. It’s time we started defending Western Culture and the USA itself, because it’s the USA and Western Culture that enables us to live in the freedom and ease that we do.
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