The First Warrior looked out on the land and his Home.
He saw the hills
And the stars
And he was happy.
For giving him his home, the first warrior told the Great Spirit
That he would fight and win many battles in His honor.
But the Great Spirit said, “No, do not fight for me.
Fight for your tribe,
Fight for the family born to you,
Fight for the brothers you find.”
“Fight for them,” the Great Spirit said, “for they are your Home.”

— Henry Standing Bear to Eda Black Kettle, Longmire Season 2, “The Great Spirit”

July 4th is, for people like us, a very bittersweet day.

On the one hand, it is the day on which we celebrate the birth of the greatest nation in the world, founded on the radical yet timeless notion that free men have the God-given right to use their freedom as they, and they alone, see fit. It is the day on which we relive the manner in which free-born Englishmen of extraordinary wisdom and erudition were pushed by an out-of-control King and Parliament to reluctantly and painfully sever their ties to the Crown, to become traitors to all that they had once held dear, and to forge upon the anvil of history a new nation for the sole purpose of reclaiming the rights that they had always known were theirs. And it is the day on which we celebrate with our dearest family and closest friends the freedoms that they, and so many other Americans since then, paid for in blood and fire and death.

On the other hand, it is also the day on which people like us acknowledge, with terrible aching sadness, that the America for which those legendary men fought and bled and died is itself dead. And the gruesome, shambling corpsified horror that it has become, grows more ugly, disgusting, stupid, and filthy by the day.

It daily comes closer to total disintegration- and the ghastly wounds that the American people themselves have afflicted upon it grow more gangrenous with every passing moment.

The country is getting to the point where Independence Day is becoming an increasingly ridiculous euphemism, and it really should be replaced with Dependence Day.

The last couple of times that I wrote about America on July 4th, back in 2013 and then again in 2015 (I skipped 2014 because, well, I’m kind of lazy sometimes), I indulged the fatalistic and pessimistic inclinations of folks like us because I saw little reason for hope.

But not this year.

This year, I see hope returning to the eyes of a once-great people who had forgotten who and what they are. I see hope returning to the silent sullen people of England and Wales, who just voted a few days ago to give their own imperial pretenders to the throne an epic middle finger- without a single shot fired.

I see hope in the eyes of free men and women who attend rallies held by Trump-Muad’Dib, because they are waking up, slowly, and realising that the idea of America- that beautiful, glorious vision of a free people living by their own exertions and beholden only to God Himself- is still out there, still alive, and still waiting for her children to reclaim her.

So how, then, is a pessimistic, cantankerous, curmudgeonly realist like me supposed to reconcile the idea that is America- that glorious, magnificent poetry of the Declaration of Independence, in which every line seethes with righteous anger at what her people had been forced to endure, that magisterial brilliance of the Constitution which displays an unparalleled understanding of the nature of Man- with the reality of the dead and decaying corpse that crushes its people ever more brutally under its putrefying weight?

By remembering that a nation is more than just geography- more than the land, the rivers and streams, the lakes and oceans, the hills and plains and deserts, and the stars in the sky above it.

Vox Day stated, rightly, that the nation of America, as envisioned by the Founding Fathers, is dead. But he has also stated, rightly, that nation is also a people.

So let me tell you, as a man who loves freedom and as such loves both the American nation and its people, what I have learned of the American people.

As I have said repeatedly, the real America is not to be found in the big cities like New York- the degenerate cesspits of filth, corruption, and toxic cultural sewer-swamps that make a mockery of the agrarian, decentralised ideals of the Founders. It is not to be found in fashionably liberal/progressive towns like Nyack or Mill Neck- which, if they were wiped off the face of the Earth by some unfortunate cosmic accident, would be small loss indeed.

It is to be found in the heartlands of this land of wonders and riches. It is to be found in the towns nestled in the Catskills and the Adirondacks of upstate New York. It is to be found within the aromas of milk and cow shit (yeah, I know) in the farms of Vermont. It is to be found in the granite and the valleys of New Hampshire.

It is to be found in the silent hallowed ground of the Alamo in San Antonio; the shipyards of Norfolk; the vineyards of California; the endless rolling plains of Montana and Wyoming; the mountains of Colorado; the brutal heat of the desert in Arizona and Texas and Nevada.

It is to be found on the Freedom Trail, starting at the Boston Common and ending at the site of Old Ironsides, the USS Constitution. I visited the Bunker’s Hill Monument with my family recently and it did not disappoint; it is there that you understand, truly, just how desperate that fight for independence was and how closely it walked the knife-edge of failure before God’s will for America prevailed.

It is to be found within the hearts and hands of a profoundly good and decent people- a people that I have had the singular honour and privilege of living among for nearly ten years now.

Let me give you an example of what the real America is like- and then you will understand why I believe that there is hope.

Two days ago I was up in Vermont to watch my good friend and training partner in his debut amateur MMA fight. I drove up there with another good friend; we started out way too goddamn early in the morning, we were both tired when we began the trip, and it was a long drive- through some truly spectacular countryside. We were already exhausted when we got there, and we knew that it would be a long day ahead yet before we could rest.

But we knew that we needed to be there to support our brother, and so we went.

We were the only ones from our school who made it out there- it’s not exactly easy to make a 6-hour drive like that on a long weekend, after all. But it was worth every minute of the trip to get out there and see our brother show great heart and spirit in his fight. He was robbed of a victory by a split decision- I don’t know what the hell the judges were thinking- but I went to him, hugged him as I would a brother, and told him how proud I was of what he had accomplished.

And afterwards, we were both invited to a barbecue at the house of the organiser.

We were sitting out there on the shores of Lake Champlain, eating burgers and hot dogs, burning wood and sticks in a massive bonfire, listening to commercial rock music from some radio station nearby, and watching fireworks exploding in the sky while youngsters kayaked and frolicked in the water, the amateur MMA fighters talked shop and submission techniques, and the old farts cooked and chatted.

It was, quite simply, the perfect end to a great day.

Now, my friend and I were the ONLY non-white people there. With our darker skin and Asian features, we stood out like sore thumbs- in probably the whitest state in the entire Union. On top of which, anyone who has ever met me knows that, even after ten years in America, I don’t sound anything like an American, stubbornly insisting- as I do- on using English vernacular and idioms and spelling everything properly. (On the drive back, my friend asked me what it’s like driving on the “other” side of the road; I immediately responded, “you mean the CORRECT side of the road”, which he found rather amusing given that he was born in Asia but has spent some twenty years as an American citizen.)

Yet not once did I feel unwelcome. Not once was I treated “differently” in any real way by those who had generously extended the hand of friendship and hospitality to a total stranger from “somewhere down south”.

That, my friends, is the real America. The people of this nation are generous, tolerant, and decent to a fault- provided that you earn your place here. It is a land of endless possibilities, where peace and plenty have been achieved on a level never seen before in human history.

That is the America that people will fight for- just as the Great Spirit once commanded the First Warrior to do.

All you have to do is drive through it on a clear day with the Sun shining down from a cloudless azure sky to think to yourself that this truly is God’s own country.

So what, you may ask, are we to do with our present predicament? How are we to go about finding America again? What are we to do when the corpse of America finally disintegrates and the inevitable wars between the tribes begin?

I cannot, to my great regret, speak as an American. That right to be called “American” must be earned, through time and toil and sacrifice- not through some tyrannical executive order that magically turns heathen aliens who have no affection for the idea of America and who barely speak English into “American citizens”.

Like Milo Yiannopoulos and Gavin McInnes, I am an outsider with a deep affection and admiration for America and its people who considers himself blessed beyond counting to have the opportunity to live and work here. People like me are what Mr. McInnes calls “de Tocquevilleans” who carry on the tradition of that great man in observing, and at times gently sending up, the curious quirks and affectations of a people that we actually rather like.

It is in that capacity that I say this: I do not know the destination, but based on everything I have seen, it seems intuitively obvious to me that the Lord Himself still has a plan for your nation- and thus for your people.

I believe, as President Reagan believed, that America is a nation under God, and that God intended for Americans to be free.

I also believe that those whom the Lord would destroy, He first makes mad. Says so right there in the Good Book, many times over- 1st and 2nd Kings has quite a few examples unless I’m very much mistaken. All you have to do is to look at the right-on elites who control this country nowadays to see that I am right. They are completely, utterly, and blindly barking mad. Their forefathers would have looked at these, their descendants, and locked them up for their own safety, such is the drooling, swivel-eyed lunacy that is their fate today.

When- not if, but when– America, the nation, breaks apart, America, the people, will have the chance to find the American spirit once again. And they will do so if only they heed the words of the Great Spirit, and fight for their brothers and sisters, for their tribes, for the families born to them.

That is their home. That is America. And it is worth fighting for.

She is out there, waiting for you and me. What, then, are you waiting for?

Let the Fourth of July always be a reminder that here in this land, for the first time, it was decided that man is born with certain God-given rights; that government is only a convenience created and managed by the people, with no powers of its own except those voluntarily granted to it by the people. We sometimes forget that great truth, and we never should. Happy Fourth of July.

— President Ronald Wilson Reagan, July 4th, 1981