Make Americans Proud Again

Make Americans Proud Again

Matt Margolis  

John Trumbull, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Patriotism used to be something that Americans celebrated. Now, kids are taught to sneer at their own country, to see only its sins and not its staggering achievements. America deserves better than that. As our nation approaches its 250th birthday, three prominent conservative voices are stepping up to change the story being told to the next generation.

Dr. Ben Carson, Kirk Cameron, and Riley Gaines are joining forces in 2026 around a single, urgent mission: making sure American children grow up knowing the truth about the country they call home. They come from wildly different backgrounds — an operating room, a Hollywood set, and a swimming pool — but they're aligned on one point. What is happening to America's kids is deliberate. And it will not fix itself.

The numbers are hard to argue with. A June 2025 Gallup poll found that only 41% of Gen Z adults say they are proud to be American — the lowest of any generation, compared with 83% of the Silent Generation. It won’t surprise you to learn that Democrats are driving that decline in patriotism. Meanwhile, the federal government's own National Report Card shows just 13% of eighth graders are proficient in U.S. history.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can make Americans proud again.

Carson, who grew up in deep poverty in Detroit and was raised by a mother with only a third-grade education, who could not read. He credits the true story of America with saving his own life. He became one of the world's most celebrated neurosurgeons, received the Medal of Freedom, and served as a member of Donald Trump’s Cabinet during his first term. His life is the embodiment of the American Dream. Naturally, he is furious that this story is being systematically hidden from the children who need it most.

"Every movement that has sought to destroy a nation has followed the same playbook: before you can transform a country, you have to erase its memory," Carson told PJ Media. "You strip the children of their history, you teach them to despise their own country, and then you offer them your replacement. Such a movement is taking root in America today. It is not an accident. It is a strategy. Our kids are being taught that America is stolen land, that our founders were villains, and that there is nothing here worth protecting. That is not education. That is demolition. I grew up in poverty in Detroit, and the true story of this country saved my life. I wrote Built on Faith because every child in America deserves that same opportunity before it's erased for good."

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Cameron brings a Hollywood insider's eye to the fight. After spending decades inside the entertainment machine and walking away to build something different, he knows exactly how cultural narratives get manufactured, and who they're targeting. "I have traveled this country from coast to coast, and I can tell you, the American people are not what they are being told they are," Cameron told PJ Media. "They are generous, faithful, hardworking, and they love this country. The problem is nobody is telling that story to their kids. We are."

And then there’s Gaines. She first stepped into the public arena when she was forced to compete against biological male swimmer Will "Lia" Thomas, managed to tie with him, and was denied a trophy.

"A generation that does not know its own history cannot defend its own freedom," she told PJ Media. "I have seen it firsthand on college campuses across this country. Kids who have been fed nothing but shame about America since before they could think for themselves. By the time they get to college it is already too late. We have to reach them young and we have to reach them with the truth."

The vehicle for that truth is BRAVE Books, a Texas-based, faith-focused children's publisher trusted by more than 275,000 families nationwide. The three new titles — Carson's Built on Faith, Cameron's Built by the Brave, and Gaines' 1, 2, 3 We Are Free — are included in the "America Wins Bundle," a limited-edition collection marking the nation's 250th birthday.

"What we have built with Dr. Ben Carson, Kirk Cameron, and Riley Gaines for America's 250th birthday is the most ambitious and important project we have ever undertaken," said BRAVE Books founder and CEO Trent Talbot. "These are not just books. This is a movement. And these three voices represent exactly the kind of courage, faith, and conviction that built this country in the first place."

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2026/03/28/make-americans-proud-again-n4951175?utm_source=pjmediavip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm

Another Attempt At 'No Kings' Today? Why?

Another Attempt At 'No Kings' Today? Why?

Eric Florack 

PJ Media

Leftists are trying again with the “No Kings” nonsense. They’re out there today, making fools of themselves, objecting to Donald J. Trump. I’ve already written repeatedly about this sorry business, without really examining what is driving these folks, and given today’s events, perhaps it’s time that I do.

I find myself forever fascinated by the left and their attitudes toward President Trump. Not appreciative, mind you, and certainly not convinced of the justification of the reactionary venom they apply to every single action the President takes, particularly when they offer no demonstrably viable counter agenda.

For example, I’m old enough to remember when Democrats liked the idea of using reciprocal tariffs to protect and grow American businesses. They also tended to take the threats by China to our industry seriously. Somewhere along the way, they lost that edge and now disregard the trillion-dollar trade deficits, which we have no hope of sustaining. Because of Trump’s actions, the bean counters are projecting on the order of $300 billion in new revenue, and foreign businesses are investing upwards of $15 trillion in America as of March 10th of this year. Domestic businesses are upping the ante as well.

Based on their reaction, it seems the left is worried that China will lose money because of Trump. And they’re right. The trouble is that they inexplicably consider China’s loss, and for that matter, America’s gain, a bad thing.

Take, for example, the president’s America First policies. The left will praise Volodymyr Zelensky all day long for putting HIS country first, and yet will chastise Trump for taking the same position about America. He was elected by the people of America. Shouldn’t he be representing their interests?

Speaking of Zelensky, why did the left, back in the spring of 2025, complain so bitterly about Trump’s attempts at peace negotiations? You will remember perhaps the knee-jerk reactions of the Democrats to Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, despite it being a summit that the EU leaders almost universally praised. After all, the EU by that point had a war on their very back yards with nobody, not even those self-same EU leaders, making a move toward ending it, or even limiting it. Their praise was understandable. After all, at that point, there was already about a million and a half wounded, missing, or dead. But leftists in this country complained bitterly about it.

Then the left reacted negatively when, about a week after that, Zelensky, along with those same EU leaders, flew to the White House. I don’t know, but it seems to me likely that the reason for their objection to this process is that it is a path that they, under Obama, didn’t have the courage to follow.

What was the plan of the Democrats with Ukraine? What did Biden do? He provided massive amounts of arms and money so that both sides of that conflict could keep fighting and dying, with no way to get either side to back down. Not even a hint at diplomacy, which historically, the left champions as a nearly knee-jerk reaction.

When Biden was in the White House, some 14 million illegal aliens flooded into our country, with a good half million being tagged as violent criminals in their own countries. That situation has changed under Trump, to where there is statistically no illegal immigration, with a million who entered the country under Biden, have left the country voluntarily, and 100,000 more have been deported.

Meanwhile, the left fights like a cornered raccoon against the enforcement of Immigration laws that the vast majority of Americans want strictly enforced. If we take their complaints and their protests seriously, we must assume that they don’t want our immigration laws enforced. You really must wonder what their goal here is. Should we be allowing millions of unvetted and often criminal aliens so that the census can be tilted in favor of the Democrats? That’s not even addressing the issues of illegal aliens voting, which they’ve been shown repeatedly to do. JustFacts.com tells us:

In 2014, the academic journal Electoral Studies published a groundbreaking study by three scholars who estimated how frequently non-citizens were illegally voting. Based on data for the 2008 presidential and congressional elections, the study found that:

• “Roughly one quarter of non-citizens” in the U.S. “were likely registered to vote.”
• “6.4% of non-citizens actually voted.”
• 81.8% of them “reported voting for Barack Obama.”

illegal votes cast by non-citizens “likely” changed “important election outcomes” in favor of Democrats, “including Electoral College votes” and a “pivotal” U.S. Senate race that enabled Democrats to pass Obamacare.

The study’s voter registration rate was estimated with data from two key sources:

• A national survey in which 14.8% of non-citizens admitted that they were registered to vote.
• A database of registered voters that reveals what portion of the surveyed non-citizens “were in fact registered” even though “they claimed not to be registered.”

By combining these data, the author’s “best” estimate was that 25.1% of non-citizens were illegally registered to vote.

The left seems to feel that this is a net positive. That’s understandable if we take as a given that they approve of illegal immigrants voting because it supports their candidates and their misbegotten policies.

Then we have Iran, where the left apparently preferred Obama’s approach, which all but handed nukes to the insane Islamic dictatorship. What could possibly go wrong? Both the left and the centrist GOP have been kicking that particular can down the road for very nearly five decades, under the guise of “diplomacy,” which in the end has actually made the problem worse. And for all the moralistic and legalistic preaching they do, they’ve apparently forgotten the people in Iran. They’d rather have those people suffer and die than admit Trump’s actions are the correct ones.

I can’t help looking at the Democrat party of today without wistfully recalling what JFK said at his inaugural address, back in 1961: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Apparently, they’ve either forgotten what Kennedy said that day or they reject it outright, either of which would make me question why they still consider him a party icon. I believe that Kennedy would not want anything to do with the Democrat party of today, which in turn explains why the polling of the last several years has been showing the Democrats of today are just about equal in popularity with raw sewage.

The anti-America left finds itself being strictly contrarian. If Trump wants peace, leftists go out of their way to support war, as in Ukraine. Yet they come down against the reckoning being waged in Iran.

Trump wants prosperity; they fight to maintain poverty. If individual freedom is the issue, they fight for virtual slavery. Witness the doings in Cuba over the last few weeks, and their whining about our arrest of Maduro as two prime examples of such. Instead of being pleased that the law is being enforced, they side with the criminal.

So deeply into this contrary position are they that they’ve invested literally billions in tax dollars in over 90 versions of lawfare, in bogus investigations, they’ve tried to jail him, and they've tried impeaching him twice. Heck, they’ve even tried killing the man. And he just gets stronger.

And most recently, they fight tooth and nail to keep a bill from passing that repeated polling shows that well over 80% of American voters from both parties support: The SAVE Act.

Why do they continue? Simple: They’re not worried that his policies will fail; they’re concerned about being shamed by comparison to what the establishments of both parties have offered us, his policies will be wildly successful.

So they have been. And America’s success under Trump, particularly the long, long list of failures the left has given us, is something they simply cannot stand.

Remember, gang, as you watch the riots erupting today: Businesses and municipalities have never had to board their windows because of conservatives.

https://pjmedia.com/eric-florack/2026/03/28/another-attempt-at-no-kings-today-why-n4951165?utm_source=pjmediavip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm

Where Is the Arc of Justice Headed?

Where Is the Arc of Justice Headed?

Michael Barone 

AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

Former President Barack Obama liked to quote the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s line that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Of course, what was an expression of optimism for the moral reformer King was more like a victory spike of the football for a competitor in a zero-sum electoral contest like Obama.

More importantly, the belief that things are moving toward justice comes more naturally to believers in American exceptionalism, of which Obama isn't one. He famously said that he believed in America's exceptionalism only as much as "Brits" believe in British exceptionalism or Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.

But British and Greek exceptionalism look to distant pasts and encompass the idea of decline, which, if not the opposite of justice, is certainly not positive. Britons may look with pride on the British Empire, but not without a twinge of regret that it has all but disappeared. Greeks may look back on the astonishing creativity of Athens 2,500 years ago, but not without recognizing that it was held down under the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires for almost all the centuries since.

In contrast, the United States has a history that can be easily, if perhaps oversimply, interpreted as a story of continual winning. Economic growth — the exception rather than the rule before 1800 in European lands — has been cumulative over time. Cultural progress abounds: the abolition of slavery, equality for women, and civil rights for Black people, all have advanced, though with some setbacks over the years.

In such an environment, it may seem natural to believe that, as a general rule, anyway, things get better. Yet the long run of history teaches different lessons. Historians of ancient cultures and their archaeological colleagues can describe marked declines of civilization enough for one of them to title a book "1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed."

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Edward Gibbon, listening to the monks chanting vespers on the steps of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, was inspired to write the history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the first volume of which came out in February 1776 and is still in print today.

Historians continue to dispute just how much and even whether the Roman Empire declined. But it seems indisputable that its military forces dwindled, its long-distance trade petered out, and its technological advances were forgotten. It took centuries for Europeans to figure out how to build a dome like that of the Pantheon in Rome, but there it is today.

In American politics over the last century, it has been the Democrats whose rhetoric proclaims them as the party of progress. Some of this has a Marxist base, the New Deal idea that a complex industrialized society should have an increasingly large government to protect and guide individuals.

To many since at least the 1980s, that argument seems antique. Big government has not managed to build a single mile of track for California's high-speed rail line in 19 years, while the private sector has developed artificial intelligence at astonishing rates. Note also that in this century Americans, including recent immigrants, have been moving out of big-government states like New York, Illinois and California, and into small-government states like Florida, Tennessee and Texas.

Republicans under Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes made the argument and provided some proof that market-friendly policies can produce more than big government. But President Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" mantra suggests moving back to some unspecified moment in the past.

Perhaps to the low-immigration, high-family-formation, high-churchgoing 1950s in which Trump and his baby boom predecessors, former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, grew up. In any case, Trump's inevitable retirement leaves Republicans uncertain and probably divided on what progress and decline mean.

For articulate Democrats, the focus has moved from economics — on which they make vague promises of more redistribution to the less affluent — and toward cultural issues. But on that, their confidence that the arc of justice moves their way has encountered some turbulence. They have seen American opinion do so on some issues, notably same-sex marriage, but not on abortion or immigration.

Or, as the liberal economist Noah Smith argues, in their isolated communities — trendy central city neighborhoods, affluent suburbs and university towns — and sycophantic media, they have failed to notice that most Americans don't believe, or aren't moving closer to believing, that "racial preferences in hiring, leniency toward petty crime and illegal immigration, and trans women on women's sports teams are basic rights."

My sense is that the arc of history moves around, and sometimes in a malign direction. Notably, among the sharply increasing antisemitism of the university Left (now installed in New York's Gracie Mansion) and in the emergence of a less numerous but equally disturbing antisemitism on the fringes of the podcast Right from Southwest outposts to the woods of Maine. There are some directions in which the arc of history should never head again.

https://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbarone/2026/03/27/where-is-the-arc-of-justice-headed-n2673505?utm_source=thdailyvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&utm_content=ncl-FZMbYkTYpW&utm_term=&_nlid=FZMbYkTYpW&_nhids=ncdGxHGkCPEzls