A new Pew Research Center study set out to learn why citizens of 25 different countries, including the United States, are proud of their nation. The study surveyed more than 30,000 people from various countries and found that “freedoms and liberties” were the two most common factors for why Americans said they are proud of their country. A total of 22% of Americans said the nation’s freedoms and liberties made them proud. The “U.S. is one of a few countries surveyed in which this is the case,” according to Pew. “I am proud that the United States has a commitment to individual liberty, freedom of religion, and speech for its citizens,” a 54-year-old American woman said on the survey. But Pew also found the U.S. is the “only country surveyed in which there are significant partisan differences in pride over the country’s freedoms.” Among those surveyed, 32% of Republicans mentioned freedoms and liberties being a source of national pride, while only 15% of Democrats used the words when describing why they are proud of the U.S. Pew found other common reasons U.S. citizens were proud of their country, including the economy, “the American dream,” the American people, and the opportunities present in the U.S. The other nations Pew surveyed are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Poland, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, and the U.K. “Freedom” or “freedom of expression” was also a common source of national pride for 17% of respondents from Canada, 22% from France, 16% from Germany, 15% from Kenya, 11% from South Africa, and 24% from Sweden. Pew also notes that many Dutch praise the “large degree of freedom of speech” in the Netherlands. July 4, 2026, marks America’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, in which the signers called themselves “a free people.” The signers declared the Colonies “free and independent states … absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown.” While survey respondents from the U.K. did not mention “freedom” as a significant source of national pride, 25% did say they are proud of the British people for being “kind” and “honest.” The post Why Are US Citizens Proud of America? New Study Reveals 2 Key Reasons appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We’re heading, this year, in November, to the midterms. There’s a lot of opposition to the Trump counterrevolution. There’s talk of a Democratic resurgence. But before we write off the Republicans—and I’m very confident. I think they’re gonna do well in the midterms, for reasons I’ve outlined before. Do we really want the alternative? Because I think the way to characterize the new democratic socialist party is it’s sort of a graveyard of bad ideas. That is that, especially in the Obama administration and in the post-George Floyd period, we were told that there were new paradigms, new exegesis, new protocols, agendas that were going to be lasting and permanent, and change America for the better. And they have been tried under former President Joe Biden, and they’ve been found wanting. And I think they’re mostly, now, relegated, as I said, to the boneyard, maybe, of bad ideas. One of them was this idea that a previously small minority of people that suffered from gender dysphoria—maybe 0.001% of the population—was actually a huge group of oppressed peoples, in the manner of the civil rights plight of African Americans or Latinos. And therefore, we had to recognize separate restrooms for trans people. Boys—biological men, I should say, competing in female sports. And we just went whole hog. I think all of us at work, all of a sudden, one day, we woke up and people were listing their pronouns. I haven’t seen that recently. Anyway, we were told there was this large stealthy constituency of oppressed trans people and that they had innate grievances against the majority. And they were quite big. I don’t think people bought into the idea that there are more than two biological genders. The rest, I think, as a recent Czech diplomat lectured former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Munich, Germany, the rest are socially constructed. Nor did we really look at the effect of biological males competing in sports, especially contact sports—that can be volleyball or things like boxing—the effect of a biological male on female sports, and the fairness, or I should say unfairness, of it. And of course, the transitional surgery, the effect on hormones. The Left had been so careful to warn us about Big Pharma and the medical industry and unnecessary procedures, and yet they were very undiscriminating and just kind of approved whole-hog the idea that you can make these radical surgeries on young teenagers and give them very dangerous drugs—steroids and hormones, antidepressants. And I think now we’ve seen the result of it. And it’s not gonna recur. Open borders were another bad idea. And we had 10,000 people coming across the border. I think the iconic turning point was when Alejandro Mayorkas, the former Biden homeland security secretary, was standing on a podium and saying at the border, “The border is secure.” And you could see thousands of people coming in—10,000 a day, 10 million to 12 million over four years. I don’t think anybody realizes the enormity of the task to find those 10 million to 12 million. They added to a pool of 20 million, giving us 30 million illegal aliens. And we had another 20 million people not born in the United States that were residents. Some were citizens, some were legal residents, some were on student visas. But the point is, we have 53 million people, 16% of the population wasn’t born here, without any idea how to assimilate, acculturate, or integrate them into the body politic. So, I think the idea of open borders, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio pointed out in Europe, is a dead letter. Nobody’s gonna come back and say, “We have to let in another 10 million or 5 million.” It impacts the poor. It swamps our social welfare network, as we’ve seen with 500,000 criminals. It spikes our crime. Another one is the idea that we’re gonna live in a United Nations utopia and you really don’t need a deterrent military. Europe went down that path after the end of the Cold War, 1991, all through the ’90s and the new millennium. They disarmed. Germany went from having the biggest army in NATO to having one that wasn’t really an army anymore. Europe, despite its $20 trillion gross domestic product and despite its 500 million-plus population, is totally disarmed. We ourselves let our defenses lax under Biden. I think everybody sees now, after the Iranian nuclear threat, what China’s up to, what Russia is doing in Ukraine, that you have to deter your enemies. And that requires a strong defense budget. I think, as well, we owe—we’re getting into the trillions of dollars. And we’re anticipated to get to, in the next decade, I don’t know, it could be $40 trillion in debt. It’s not sustainable. The interest on the debt, right now, is larger than the defense budget. Europe is suffering the same malaise. But the idea of modern monetary theory—the Left told us—or that since we are loaning the money to ourselves and bondholders, it’s turned out to be bogus. The fact is we ran up all of this debt because the Fed, during the Obama and first Trump administration and the first Biden administration, kept interest rates low, so we borrowed billions, trillions of more dollars, at rates as low as 2% or 3%. And now the rates came up. And we saw what a catastrophic idea that was when we have to service it. I don’t think anybody’s gonna make the argument that we need more socialist entitlement programs funded by borrowed money. If you borrow the money and it’s unsustainable, you only have three choices: you can default on it and ruin the nation’s credit rating, you can confiscate money, or you can inflate your way out of it. There’s a fourth, but I don’t see Europe, yet, learning that lesson: You can grow your economy and get greater revenues. That’s what we’re trying to do in the United States. Fifth, finally, very quickly, I think diversity, equity, and inclusion has sort of been exhausted. It’s showed not to be unworkable, that is, how do you determine who is a victim and part of the victim/victimizer binary, historical grievances? If you’re Latino or black or Asian, do you prove that somebody was mean to you? Your great-grandfather was a slave—great, great. It’s very hard, if you’re one-quarter white, half-Asian, one-quarter Latino, what particular group are you? It was an emphasis on superficial appearance, contrary to the content of our character. It was on the color of your skin. That didn’t work out too well. It gave people exemptions, and it said that, I, psychologically, if I make a mistake or I don’t work hard or I wanna apply to Harvard, but I don’t have the SAT scores or the grades of other people, I should get that. Or if I’m in a pilot training program or I’m a surgeon and I don’t quite make the standards, there’s other criteria, kinda like the Russian commissar system, where if you were ideologically pure, then you were given exemptions from performance. And so, I think we now see that DEI is disruptive, it’s discriminatory. And I think, after experimenting with this under the guise of affirmative action, but especially, the last four or five years, people are sick of it. It’s incoherent. And it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous. It puts people in key positions in the economy, where life and death matters, and they are promoted or assessed or retained on criteria other than merit. And so, we can sum up by saying there’s four or five things that went full-bloom, full-blast under the Obama and Biden administrations. And I think President Donald Trump and this counterrevolution were able to show the American people that the trans fixation, the open borders, the idea of being pretty much disarmed, deficits—I call it deficit socialism—and DEI didn’t work out. There was a laboratory United States that tried these things, and it hasn’t worked. And Europe, I think, would agree that it has to follow the same pathway of reform or it’s going to end up a Third World country. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post The New Democratic Socialist Party Is a ‘Graveyard of Bad Ideas’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

I never thought in a million years I would be telling my own abortion story. I’m an ER nurse. I’ve built my career on saving lives—running codes, stopping hemorrhages, stabilizing patients when seconds matter. Abortion was never something I imagined intersecting with my life. It was something that happened somewhere else, to someone else. Until it was me. As Congress demands answers from the Trump administration and the Federal Drug Administration about mail-order abortion drug safety data and oversight—with lawmakers like Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Bill Cassidy, R-La., calling for investigations—I read those headlines differently. For me, this isn’t theoretical. It’s about what happened when abortion drugs were just a few clicks away, no in-person exam required, and I was under pressure at home. I was separated from my husband and preparing for a divorce when I became pregnant. When I told him, he didn’t rage. He gave me an ultimatum: abort the baby, or he would fight to take our other children from me. He made it clear he would use custody as leverage unless I “fixed” the situation. That threat—losing my children—is what broke me. He insisted I would be “saving multiple lives vs only one fetus.” His pressure was constant: “The clock is ticking.” “Order the pills.” “Get it done.” I was already emotionally exhausted from a failing marriage. Now I was terrified of a custody battle that could upend my children’s lives. I had my first panic attack. I spent days in my room, barely functioning. Eventually, under the pressures, mental distress and threat of losing my other children, I lost sight of the risks & caved to the demands of my ex-husband. I ordered the abortion drugs online. There was no in-person appointment. No ultrasound. No physical exam. No private screening for coercion. Not even a video call with a provider. My entire communication was via a chat app. The drugs were mailed to a hotel across state lines and I drove there to retrieve them. I took the first round of drugs under my ex-husband’s surveillance. He was there to confirm I actually did it. It broke my heart because, as a nurse, I understood what I was holding. I knew the risks: heavy bleeding, retained tissue, infection, and possible need for emergency intervention.  I was borderline anemic at the time. That increases the risk of significant blood loss. In a hospital setting, that history would prompt careful counseling and evaluation. Instead, I received a brief chat message noting I might have heavier bleeding and should reach out if it was excessive. No one assessed me in person. No one reviewed labs. No one ensured I wasn’t being threatened at home. After I took the first round of drugs, my nursing background kicked in. I couldn’t stop picturing what they would do to me—intentionally triggering contractions, potentially delivering my baby alone in a bathroom, watching a tiny body outside the womb because of a decision I made under duress. I had enough. I couldn’t take the second round of drugs. I refused despite all of the pressure, insistence, and fear. I would not be pressured anymore. Out of the shadow of my ex-husband, I scheduled an ultrasound at a local pregnancy center. I will never forget that moment while there—seeing a heartbeat still there. Strong and steady. My baby was still alive! I started a progesterone regimen in an attempt to counteract the effects of the first drug. When my ex-husband found out, he told me to “finish the job.” The custody threats resurfaced. He drove me to an abortion center. But I couldn’t walk through those doors. I had already come face-to-face with the reality of what I was about to lose. Months later, I delivered a healthy baby girl: Kaylie Grace. The first time I saw her face, I fell completely in love. I named her Grace as a reminder—to give myself grace for the choice I almost made when I felt cornered and afraid. Today she is joyful, spunky, and healthy. Her older siblings adore her. The very children I was told I might lose are still with me and cherish the sister who nearly wasn’t here. As lawmakers scrutinize the oversight of mail-order abortion drugs, I hope they understand this: when these powerful drugs are prescribed and shipped without in-person evaluation, there is no safeguard against coercion. In emergency medicine, we are trained to screen for intimate partner violence. We separate patients from controlling partners. We ask direct questions: Are you safe? Is anyone pressuring you? That cannot be done through a checkbox or chatbot. Mail-order abortion was presented to me as convenient, simple, empowering. In reality, it made it easier for someone to pressure me quickly and privately. It removed the human interaction that might have uncovered the threats hanging over my head. I used to think abortion would never touch my life.  This isn’t an abstract policy fight. It’s about whether we treat abortion drugs like a casual consumer product—or like what they are: powerful drugs that are designed to end one life and have real risks for the other life.  I am still healing. I still sometimes cry and whisper apologies when Kaylie Grace is asleep. I’m overwhelmed with the gratitude that she is here. I am an ER nurse. I understand risk. I understand informed consent. And I know this: No one should be able to obtain these high-risk drugs through the mail. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post The Trump Admin’s Refusal to Act on Mail-Order Abortion Drugs Is Personal for Me appeared first on The Daily Signal.

While the national news cycle may have moved on from the chaos in Minnesota surrounding protests of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a deeper story is only beginning to surface. What happened in Minneapolis wasn’t spontaneous, but the result of weeks of astroturfed chaos following expanded federal immigration enforcement and a fatal ICE-involved shooting.  To truly understand how the situation spiraled, you have to understand who helped fuel the unrest and who financed the networks that kept it going.  That’s exactly what Daily Wire reporter Brecca Stoll has been investigating. She joins the latest episode of “Problematic Women” to unpack the money, organizations, and political forces operating behind the scenes of ICE protests.  And don’t think we’ve forgotten about New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. About one month into his tenure, he now faces the reality of governing the nation’s largest municipal economy.  Conservatives warned his democratic socialist promises would collide with real-life fiscal and political constraints. And now, New Yorkers are paying for it.  Catch the full conversation with Elise McCue on her final episode of “Problematic Women”—for now.  Enjoy the show! The post Meet the People Fueling Chaos in Minneapolis, New York, and Beyond  appeared first on The Daily Signal.

A Canadian “human rights” tribunal just exposed the Orwellian strategy of the transgender movement—it seeks to weaponize “empathy” to demand allegiance to the absurd and dangerous idea that men can become women and vice versa. Barry Neufeld, a brave school board member in the city of Chilliwack, British Columbia, dared to speak out against a school program encouraging sexual orientation and gender identity called SOGI 1 2 3. Two teachers unions, the British Columbia Teachers Federation and the Chilliwack Teachers Association, sued Neufeld on behalf of members who identify as two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer for statements he made from 2017 to 2022. The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal found Neufeld liable for “hate speech” and discrimination in a ruling Wednesday. The tribunal ordered him to pay 750,000 Canadian dollars for violating the Human Rights Code, and it ordered him to pay another CA$10,000 in damages for violating the tribunal’s rules during the proceeding against him. Neufeld, who did not oversee any of the 2SLGBTQ+ employees represented by the teachers unions, argued that he could not be held liable for discrimination against them, but the tribunal found that “his conduct permeated, and adversely impacted, [the teachers’] work environment.” The Most Revealing Statement The ruling is 112 pages, but one particular statement most reveals the threat of transgender orthodoxy. “The denial of trans identities is the theme underlying all of Mr. Neufeld’s impugned publications,” the tribunal writes. “Mr. Neufeld believes that gender is static, binary, and determined by a person’s genitals at birth. He calls modern understandings of gender – including that it is socially constructed, may be fluid, and may be different from sex assigned at birth – an ideology that must be resisted.” The tribunal includes a long quote from Neufeld defining gender ideology as “the belief system that everybody has a gender identity; that this gender identity is not determined by the biological sex of a person; that this gender identity therefore may be one of any number of gender identities … that anyone may assume any gender identity simply by self-identifying; and that a person actually is whatever gender identity that person thinks, regardless of biological sex.” Astutely, Neufeld notes that “believers of this ideology do not regard it as a belief system at all, but rather as an accurate and true account of the world.” “We can think of no better example for how transpeople are denied than this passage,” the tribunal writes. “Transpeople are, by definition, people ‘whose gender identity does not align with the sex assigned to them at birth.’ If a person elects not to ‘believe’ that gender identity is separate from sex assigned at birth, then they do not ‘believe’ in transpeople.” “This is a form of existential denial,” the tribunal added. “It is not, as Mr. Neufeld argues, akin to religious beliefs. A person does not need to believe in Christianity to accept that another person is Christian. However, to accept that a person is transgender, one must accept that their gender identity is different than their sex assigned at birth.” Smuggling in a Belief Requirement The tribunal cited one of its previous rulings finding that “the question of whether transgender people exist and are entitled to dignity in this province is as valuable to ongoing public debate as whether one race is superior to another.” Then it gave this remarkable statement: “People can and do live beyond the binary. People can and do decide that they were assigned the incorrect gender at birth. Trans people are here, existing in schools and homes and workplaces.” This isn’t just a piece of flashy rhetoric—it’s a truth claim, and it subtly twists Neufeld’s disagreement with transgender ideology into a desire for violence. Neufeld was never denying that people exist who claim to identify as the gender opposite their sex—he merely contested the claim that this gender identity is definitional for them, and that it overrides their biological sex. He expressed concern that enforcing the idea that it is healthy for someone to identify as the gender opposite their sex leads to confusion and self-harm. He rejects this ideology, not the existence of the people who believe it. But the tribunal’s interpretation of his statements smuggles in the idea that he is denying these people’s existence, that he is wishing harm upon them. The tribunal goes on to state that “calling transness ‘gender ideology’ allows anti-trans activists to hide behind a veneer of reasonableness. It allows them to say… that they are not attacking human beings.” “But behind this insidious veneer is the proposition that transness is not real,” the tribunal adds. “Such phrasing can make it easier to ignore that trans people are human beings. Referring to ‘gender ideology’ or ‘transgenderism’ … pushes the idea that trans people have an agenda rather than being just another demographic group. As this decision illustrates, such terms can create the conditions for discrimination and hatred to flourish.” Chilliwack Teachers Association v NeufeldDownload This isn’t an argument claiming that transgender ideology is true so much as an insinuation that disagreeing with transgender ideology is dangerous. The tribunal doesn’t bother to prove that a man can become a woman or vice versa—it simply states the ideology as a matter of fact and then tries to make dissent unthinkable. By postulating that transgender ideology is not up for debate, and penalizing its mere definition as a form of discrimination, the tribunal has carried out a verbal jiu jitsu worthy of George Orwell. A Cross-Border Threat Unfortunately, this isn’t new or unique to Canada—it’s just the most obvious articulation of the transgender movement’s longtime attempt to dominate the conversation. The Southern Poverty Law Center, for instance, puts conservatives and Christians who disagree with transgender ideology on a “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. The Human Rights Campaign, the Trevor Project, and other LGBTQ activist groups have repeatedly suggested that mere disagreement with the ideology is a form of violence. This ruling in Canada is merely the logical extension of the rhetoric we see in the U.S., and it should serve as a wakeup call that we must firmly reject this ideology. The post ORWELLIAN: How a Canadian ‘Human Rights’ Tribunal Tries to Make Opposition to Transgender Ideology Unthinkable appeared first on The Daily Signal.