In an era where grievance has replaced gratitude, the Fourth of July has become a hollow ritual for some.

The danger is not just in forgetting our history, but also in rewriting it through the narrow lens of modern discontent.

Let us be clear: America was not perfect in 1776. It is not perfect now. But perfection is not the metric of freedom—liberty is.

And in declaring independence, those flawed men charted a course toward a society where individuals, not monarchs or mobs, hold the reins of destiny.

There is much hand-wringing today over America's Founding Fathers—slaveholders, landowners, men of contradiction. But history does not offer saints; it offers context. And in the context of their age, the radical notion that government should derive its power from the consent of the governed was earth-shattering. That principle—not the imperfections of the men who penned it—is what we celebrate on the Fourth of July.

The alternatives offered by critics of America's founding are, frankly, unconvincing. Replace merit with quotas, liberty with bureaucracy, individual responsibility with collective guilt, and you get a society that stagnates, not flourishes. What is too often lost in modern discourse is that the freedoms we take for granted—freedom of speech, freedom of worship, due process, equal protection—are still rare commodities in much of the world.

I've spent my life examining the consequences of ideas. And few ideas have been as consequential—or beneficial—as the belief that man is born free and that government exists to secure, not bestow, those freedoms.

America, despite its sins, has done more to lift the condition of man than any other nation in history.

It is fashionable in elite circles to mock patriotism, to decry the flag as a symbol of oppression rather than emancipation. But tell that to the millions who fled tyranny to reach our shores. Tell that to the Vietnamese boat people, the Cuban refugees, the Soviet dissidents. They risked everything—not to criticize America, but to join it.

We must not let spoiled intellectuals and political opportunists redefine America as irredeemable. That is not just dishonest; it is dangerous. If we teach our children to hate the foundations of their country, do not be surprised when they tear the whole edifice down, brick by brick.