teacher, writer, pragmatic conservative. intj fantasy-history nerd, space geek, wine aunt, permanently exhausted pigeon. facts don't care about your feelings.
I have just had a tour of the West Wing of The White House.
What an incredible honour, I loved every second of it.
I wasnโt allowed any photos inside the White House apart from the press room.
However, I stuck my head in the Oval Office, walked through the halls and saw the Presidential walk of fame.
This trip continues to blow my mind, every single day.
I agreed with the person showing me around, anything is possible in America.
Who knows where we go from here.
I do not care about masked right wingers marching with the Confederate flag in DC because I have seen masked Islamist terrorists marching with the Hezbollah flag in New York, and none of the liberals who are aghast at Patriot Front seemed to have a problem with that.
America turns 250 today.
Let me read back the resume.
We started by telling a king to pound sand, in writing.
By 1803 we bought half a continent from France for about four cents an acre.
We fought a war with ourselves and somehow stayed one country.
We strung a railroad across the entire thing.
We handed the world the lightbulb, the telephone, and the airplane in about thirty years flat.
Then a man named Willis Carrier invented air conditioning and made half the planet actually livable.
You are welcome, Texas. You are welcome, Dubai.
Twice the whole world caught fire, and twice we showed up and helped put it out.
We split the atom.
We put men on the moon in 1969.
Then we went back and hit golf balls up there, because why not.
We invented jazz, blues, rock and roll, and hip-hop, and the whole planet is still dancing to it.
We put a burger and fries on every corner of the earth.
We built rockets that fly themselves home and land standing straight up.
We flew a helicopter on Mars.
We launched a car into actual space and it is still out there cruising.
We also invented ranch dressing and somehow talked the entire world into putting it on pizza.
Priorities.
We even invented three of our own sports so we could win them.
Baseball, basketball, and football.
Real football, the kind with hands, because we named it and we are not taking corrections.
The rest of the planet can keep soccer, which is fine, we are hosting it in our backyard this summer anyway.
And yes, Canadian football exists, wider field, extra man, one fewer down, and we try very hard not to think about it.
Frankly it was generous of us to invent our own games.
If we put all that energy into soccer, nobody else would ever lift that trophy again.
We would win it so often they would just rename it the Americaโs Cup and hand us the keys.
You are welcome for the suspense.
And in 2026 we threw a birthday so big a German tourist live-tweeted our gas stations to 750,000 people.
Not every chapter was clean.
We argued, we stumbled, we fixed what we broke, and we kept building.
That is the whole trick.
Two hundred and fifty years in, and we are still the loudest, brightest, most improbable experiment on the map.
Not bad for a country that started as a strongly worded letter to a king.
Happy birthday, America.
๐ฆ
@hunleyeric I show this to my the third graders each year. They're expected to know about the Constitution and branches of government but don't learn about the revolutionary war until 5th grade, so I do the readers digest version to give them some context
A man who worked at Roebling Books & Coffee, a far-left bookstore chain in northern Kentucky, went missing last month, prompting messages from the store and community asking for help. Some people suggested Todd Garland was killed for being "LGBTQ."
It turns out that Garland fled the country after the Covington Police Department raided his home regarding a child sโx crime investigation. He was found dead in Paris, France.
Roebling Books & Coffee hosts drag queen story hour events, promotes the DSA and held training to help illegal migrants evade law enforcement.
A GoFundMe campaign to cremate Garland and bring his remains back to the U.S. says the proceeds would benefit a children's camp he liked. https://t.co/8VF5jRaL1z
These eloquent words speak to me as the grateful son of a refugee who arrived here with his family, carrying little more than their hopes and dreams of freedom and a better life.