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.

The Atlantic podcaster and end-of-democracy doomsday prophet David Brooks had the temerity to claim on Friday’s PBS News Hour that he and people like him represent the “forces of humanization” in America while people like President Trump fight a “constant battle of forcing dehumanization.” Brooks lamented, “Well, Donald Trump has never had an honest disagreement with somebody and where you say, 'Oh, I disagree with you' and without him going ad hominem and that is just his nature.”   David Brooks, noted "democracy is dying" doomsday prophet, laments, "We meet people trying to heal America, trying to build conversations. And it's just frustrating that all these people are doing this work around the country at the same time, day by day, there's a shredding from… pic.twitter.com/SwqPAG5tEY — Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) February 21, 2026   He also claimed, “It is the nature of somebody with a narcissistic personality disorder to think, I am the center, and everything that's an assault on me cannot be anything but a shameful attack on all that is right and good.” Presumably referring to liberal co-panelist MS NOW host Jonathan Capehart, Brooks went on, “And so it's very hard. We travel around the country. We meet people trying to heal America, trying to build conversations. And it's just frustrating that all these people are doing this work around the country at the same time, day by day, there's a shredding from the top. And so there's these forces of humanization that are trying to have a decent country, and then the shredding from the top is just a constant battle of forcing dehumanization.” David Brooks may speak in a calm, quiet tone of voice, but the actual content of his words can be just as radical as Capehart’s. He has warned that Trump’s policies equate to death, similarly compared DOGE to several mass-murdering communist dictators, and has several times decried various Trump actions as grave threats to democracy. None of that is new for Brooks. Ten years ago he claimed Sen. Ted Cruz spoke in “dark and satanic tones.” Back when Trump was just a simple NBC reality show host, Brooks had his own ad hominem, “It doesn’t help that he [Cruz] has a face that looks a little like Joe McCarthy actually.” But, at least PBS’s resident conservative appreciated Barack Obama’s pants. Here is a transcript for the February 20 show: PBS News Hour 2/20/2026 7:45 PM ET DAVID BROOKS: Well, Donald Trump has never had an honest disagreement with somebody and where you say, “Oh, I disagree with you” and without him going ad hominem and that is just his nature. It is the nature of somebody with a narcissistic personality disorder to think, I am the center, and everything that's an assault on me cannot be anything but a shameful attack on all that is right and good. And so it's very hard. We travel around the country. We meet people trying to heal America, trying to build conversations. And it's just frustrating that all these people are doing this work around the country at the same time, day by day, there's a shredding from the top. And so there's these forces of humanization that are trying to have a decent country, and then the shredding from the top is just a constant battle of forcing dehumanization.

A high school in Virginia suspended over 300 students for walking out of class for an anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protest, and many on social media have applauded the action.On February 13, students at Woodbridge High School marched off of campus in solidarity with others across the nation who ostensibly disagree with ICE operations ordered by the Trump administration.'Good. They're there to learn, not protest ICE doing their jobs.'A letter from principal Heather Abney to parents of students said that the district did not endorse the walkout and that students who left campus without permission would be punished according to their regular code of behavior. A total of 303 students were suspended for three days. Some of the students reportedly went to a nearby shopping center after leaving campus, others went home, and some returned to the campus later. Administrators said that some of the students who returned to the school caused a disturbance as well. WDVM-TV reported the 303 students suspended from the school on Thursday comprised about 11% of the student population. Officials warned that more protests would meet with the same punishments. Many on social media praised the school for imposing consequences on the students' unruly actions."That is the best news I've heard all day!!!! Finally a school district that knows and enforces the rules," read one response."Schools need to enforce rules consistently. Leaving class without permission disrupts learning and comes with consequences, even if the cause feels important to the students," said another user on X. "Good. They're there to learn, not protest ICE doing their jobs," said another detractor. "Finally the adults are taking charge," read another response. "Protest on your own time."RELATED: Video shows brawl after HS walkout protester allegedly hit pro-ICE man — man was charged with child abuse Others questioned whether cutting the students from school was an effective punishment for cutting school. The Prince William County Police Department provided some traffic control for the protest and supervised the students for safety.The Trump administration has deported about 675,000 illegal aliens in the first year of the president's second term, and another 2.2 million are estimated to have self-deported. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

CNN: 'Immigration Officers Are Arresting US Citizens in Increasing Numbers' (Gee, Why Would THAT Be?)

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