Hi there, and welcome to Saturday, June 27, 2026. Today is National Sunglasses Day, National Ice Cream Cake Day, National Bingo Day, and Helen Keller Day.
1652: New Amsterdam (now New York City) enacts the first speed limit law in North America, prohibiting galloping on public streets. Some things never change.
1743: At the Battle of Dettingen, King George II becomes the last reigning British monarch to personally lead troops in battle.
1778: The Liberty Bell returns to Philadelphia after being secretly evacuated — along with 700 wagons of other bells — to keep the British from melting it down into musket balls. One of history’s better logistical decisions.
1844: A mob at the jail in Carthage, Illinois kills Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
1880: Helen Keller is born in Tuscumbia, Alabama. She would go on to become the first deaf and blind person to earn a bachelor’s degree, author 14 books, and become one of the most celebrated advocates for disability rights in American history.
1905: Sailors mutiny aboard the Russian battleship Potemkin during the Russo-Japanese War — later immortalized in Eisenstein’s 1925 film.
1950: President Harry Truman orders U.S. air and naval forces into the Korean conflict after North Korean troops reach Seoul and the U.N. calls on member nations to aid South Korea.
1954: The world’s first nuclear power plant opens at Obninsk, in the Soviet Union, and operates for the next 48 years.
1972: Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney found Atari, Inc. — the company that launched a thousand misspent childhoods, including quite possibly yours.
1985: Historic Route 66 is officially decertified, its highway signs ordered removed after 59 years. All 2,200 miles of American road trip mythology, gone with a bureaucratic vote.
Birthdays today include: Helen Keller, American author, lecturer, and disability rights pioneer (first deaf and blind person to earn a college degree; her story inspired The Miracle Worker); Antoinette Perry, Broadway actress, director, and producer for whom the Tony Awards are named; Bob Keeshan, television personality better known as Captain Kangaroo; J.J. Abrams, film and television producer and director (Lost, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Mission: Impossible III); Vera Wang, fashion designer; Tobey Maguire, actor (Spider-Man trilogy, The Great Gatsby, Pleasantville); and Doc Pomus, blues singer and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame songwriter who co-wrote dozens of rock and roll classics, including “Save the Last Dance for Me” and “Viva Las Vegas.”
If today’s your day as well, hope it’s a great one.
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There’s a lesson that the FIFA matches are teaching us, and the people paying good money to see them. No, Not the game itself. Soccer still bores me to tears; I’m talking about the unabashed admiration for our culture that many of the fans are being exposed to for the first time. For all their lives, there governments and their elites have told them that Americans are the pond scum of the world. Once exposed directly to us, without the filters, however, they recognize what so many Americans do not: Our strength is in our culture, not in “diversity.”
Herein we see Jonah Goldberg a few years back:
I once heard Jesse Jackson explain that racial integration of the NBA made it stronger and better. He was right. But would gender integration of the NBA have the same effect? Would diversifying professional basketball by height? Probably not.
Actually, make that absolutely not. As I wrote back in 2004, what gets celebrated in today’s NBA isn’t diversity at all — it’s a relentlessly monochromatic culture that, in my view, has crippled the game. Frankly, that’s just a diversion. On to the main course. Goldberg continues:
All of these analogies can take you only so far. Thomas Sowell once said, “The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”
There’s a growing body of evidence that even if diversity— the kind that results from immigration — once made America stronger, it may not be doing so anymore. Robert Putnam, a liberal sociologist at Harvard, found that increased diversity corrodes civil society by eroding shared values, customs and institutions. People tend to “hunker down” and retreat from civil society, at least in the short and medium term.
I think the real culprit here isn’t immigration or diversity in general, but the rising stigma against assimilation. Particularly on college campuses, but also in large swaths of mainstream journalism and in the louder corners of the fever swamp right, the idea that people of all backgrounds should embrace a single conception of “Americanism” is increasingly taboo.
Anyone of any race or national origin can be an American, but it requires effort and desire from both the individual and the larger society. There’s a shortage of both these days.
Now, look, I’ve had my issues with Jonah Goldberg. Let’s have no misunderstanding about that. But he’s spot on here. The quote he offers from Sowell never gets old, because what Sowell is pointing at isn’t just hypocrisy — it’s the tell.
The diversity these people preach is almost never about the exchange of genuinely different ideas, different worldviews, different ways of understanding the world. It’s about melanin and gender checkboxes, carefully arranged for the press photo, while the actual thinking in the room remains as uniform as a Soviet-era apartment block. Diversity of appearance, absolute conformity of thought. That’s the deal.
Mind you, now, this isn’t some fire-breathing conservative think tank talking. It’s not even me. This is Harvard. This is a man who, by his own admission, sat on his findings for years because he didn’t like what they said. He ran the numbers again. And again. The answer kept coming back the same. More diversity, without shared cultural glue, produces less trust — not just across groups, but within them. Neighbors trust each other less. People volunteer less, vote less, give to charity less. The social fabric doesn’t just fray at the seams. It thins everywhere.
The real culprit isn’t immigration or diversity per se — it’s the rising stigma against cultural assimilation. On college campuses, in mainstream newsrooms, and in the louder fever-swamp corners of the internet, the very idea that people of all backgrounds should embrace a common “Americanism” has become a thought crime. Anyone of any race or national origin can be an American — but it requires effort and desire from both the individual and the larger society. There’s a shortage of both these days. And that shortage didn’t happen by accident. As Rush Limbaugh himself once famously observed, the only diversity the left will not tolerate is diversity of thought.
For generations now, the deal was understood. You come here, you work hard, you learn the language, you buy into the idea of America — not perfectly, not overnight, but genuinely. Your kids grow up as Americans. Your grandkids are Americans. Every wave of immigrants — Irish, Italian, Polish, Chinese, Vietnamese — went through some version of that process. It was hard. It was sometimes ugly. But it worked, because both sides of the transaction held up their end. The newcomer made the effort to become American. And America made the effort to bring them in. Evidence of the positive aspects of that deal, are all around us, and in fact is the basis of the column I wrote yesterday regarding Hung Cao.
That bargain has been deliberately dismantled, for the most part resulting in people such as Cao being the exception, not the rule. The left decided, somewhere along the way, that assimilation was a form of cultural oppression — that asking someone to embrace American values was an act of erasure, a demand that they abandon who they are. Well, the fact is, the left doesn’t believe in America, either, as their own politics demonstrate. So like Stalin and Mao before them, they seek to destroy the culture.
The results of that are that instead of a melting pot, we got a collection of identity silos, each with its own grievances, its own narrative, its own set of demands on the larger society. E pluribus unum became e pluribus pluribus. And the center that used to hold everything together — a common language, a common history, a common set of civic ideals — got quietly dismantled, piece by piece, with a smile and a land acknowledgment.
And I’ll say again what I’ve said before: 90% or more of what gets packaged as racial issues today are actually cultural issues. When you strip away the identity politics vocabulary, what you’re almost always looking at underneath is a clash of cultural values — about work, about family structure, about the relationship between the individual and the community, about whether the institutions of this country are worth preserving or worth burning down. Race is the flag being waved, but culture is the actual battlefield.
Which brings us to the part that should make your blood run a little cold.
The same people — Democrats, mostly — who have spent decades pushing for unrestricted immigration and who were responsible for the open borders and the anti-ICE protests have also, almost without exception, been waging war on traditional American values and traditional American culture. Not accidentally. Deliberately. Using the power of government to do it, turning our own laws and institutions against us — straight out of the playbook of another Communist: Saul Alinsky. Did you think the recent spike in socialist/communist rhetoric is by accident?
Think about what that combination actually means in practice. You maximize the inflow of people who have no particular attachment to American cultural traditions — because why would they, they just got here, and nobody’s asking them to develop one. Simultaneously, you delegitimize those traditions for everyone already here — in the schools, in the media, in the corporate boardrooms doing their mandatory DEI trainings. You tell the newcomers that American culture is nothing worth assimilating into, because “It was never that great.” You tell the people already here that their culture is nothing worth defending. And then you import voters who are, by design, more dependent on government and less attached to the constitutional limits that might restrain it.
That’s not a coincidence. That’s not an unintended consequence. That’s a strategy — and it’s been working, and all too well.
The antidote to all of this isn’t to slam the door on immigration. It’s to unapologetically reassert what this country actually is, and what it asks of the people who want to be part of it. America is not an ethnicity. It never was. But it is an idea — a set of principles, a culture, a way of organizing a free society — and that idea only survives if people actually believe in it. All of them. New arrivals and old hands alike.
You can’t have a nation without a national culture. The left knows that. It’s why it has been working so hard to take ours apart. You can’t build a new house until you tear down the old one.
On the other side of the coin is what outsiders who are exposed to our people and our culture, perhaps for the first time, are saying. Josh Hammer said it well the other day:
Scores of other World Cup visitors from Europe, Asia and elsewhere have flooded social media with similar observations. They have wandered through Walmart and Costco as if they were touring cultural landmarks. They have posted videos about yellow school buses, smalltown diners, Texas barbecue, oversize grocery stores and the sheer abundance and variety that characterize everyday life in the most prosperous country on planet Earth. Elsa the Swede has fallen in love with ranch dressing. And even the Transportation Security Administration took notice, posting on social media: “If you’re visiting for a very large sporting event & you happen to discover RANCH while you’re here … please pack it in your CHECKED BAG on the way home.”
These reactions, bursting with youthful exuberance, are amusing. But they also point toward a profound insight: Sometimes it takes an outsider to recognize what insiders can no longer see.
The average American rarely pauses to consider how extraordinary our country remains today. We gripe about suburban sprawl while living in homes that would be considered luxurious by the standards of much of the world. We roll our eyes at chain restaurants that millions of foreign tourists eagerly seek out. We treat abundance as ordinary because abundance is all most of us have ever known.
That familiarity breeds a certain blindness.
I know well the phenomenon he writes of here. I wrote several years ago about the fact that living a stone’s throw from Niagara Falls, as I do, you tend to get bored with the place. That when you get to that stage, the real thrill is watching the excited reactions of tourists who have never been there before. You end up getting excited yourself vicariously. Their enthusiasm rubs off on you.
What we’re seeing from what I will call the “soccer tourists” should be a lesson in just how good our culture really is, in spite of what the socialist left has been throwing at it. There’s a wisdom in their reaction to our culture, a reaction born of direct exposure minus the globalist filters. We need to get back to that understanding, and act on it.
Thought of the day: Diversity, as the left pushes it, is such a strength that it requires a constant flow of propaganda to remind us of it, and a police state to enforce it.
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Spend your day today being a proud American today. I’ll see you here tomorrow.
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