The USA is a victim of our own apathetic devices. Is it suicide, a slow death of our once great Republic. We can and must arrest this very soon.

 

America 250 Proves That Patriotism Is Vanishing

America’s muted 250th birthday year reveals a nation increasingly divided by politics, memory, identity, and competing visions of its founding story.

Joseph Ford Cotto | September 21, 2026 www.americanthinker.com

America turned 250 this year and barely flinched. That is the sad semiquincentennial story. Not the spectacular, record-setting fireworks. Not the majestic, patriotic official program in Washington. Not the special flags that still went up in picturesque small towns.

The story is how fast a country can lose the conviction of being one people.

In 1976, the bicentennial was not a niche event for history buffs. It was a national spectacle. Tall ships entered New York Harbor. The largest American flag then made hung from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, connecting Staten Island and Brooklyn. Wagon trains retraced pioneer routes. Schoolchildren memorized the Declaration of Independence.

CBS ran Bicentennial Minutes. America Rock segments played on television. Merchandise covered the shelves: stamps, coins, mugs, plates, even commemorative toilet paper. Block parties mixed Republican and Democrat neighbors after dark. The country was coming off the Watergate scandal and long-term war in Vietnam. Torturous stagflation and mounting institutional distrust spread from sea to shining sea. Yet Americans still chose to honor their country’s birthday as a common inheritance.

This would not be the case 50 years later.

Keith Preston said as much on News Sight, the current-events insight and analysis program I host. He is a remarkably independent political analyst. For about 25 years, Preston has run a news-and-commentary site that carries voices across the political spectrum. He has written books, contributed to magazines, and lectured to paleoconservatives, Marxists, libertarians, and anarchists. That range is why his reading of the semiquincentennial is useful. He can describe what different tribes actually believe.

“The bicentennial was a big deal,” Preston said. “I remember news coverage of it being everywhere, people talking about it everywhere, banners and stickers and all that kind of stuff.”

He has not seen that for America 250.

“It seems like it’s kind of passed by unnoticed,” Preston said. “I haven’t seen a great deal of public enthusiasm for the 250. And I mean, there certainly have been commemorative events and there was something in Washington and all of that. But it’s nothing even remotely on the level of what the bicentennial was 50 years ago.”

That gap is not a programming failure. It is a civic failure.

CNN called the anniversary the “big birthday blahs.” National pride and satisfaction with the country’s direction have fallen for decades. Nearly 70 percent of Americans report dissatisfaction with the way things are going, and about 60 percent say the country’s best years are behind her. Only about half describe themselves as extremely or very proud to be American, a 25-year low. More than three in four say the Founding Fathers would be disappointed.

An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found more than 90% of Republicans proud or very proud to be American, against only 45% of Democrats.

Those numbers are an indictment of contemporary leftism, which taught a large share of America to treat the flag as a right-wing prop. In 1976, even committed lefties tried to claim America’s founding story. Preston noted that you hardly ever see this now. “The United States is really divided up into sort of a polyglot of different political tribes,” he said.

The 1619 Project made the fracture undeniable. If 1619 is the “real” founding because that is when the first slaves arrived in the 13 British colonies, which became the United States, then 1776 is not a birth. It is a cover story. “There’s a decline of an accepted unitary narrative about what it means to be American, what the American history represents, what American values actually are,” Preston said. “I don’t think anybody really agrees on what those values are.”

The old common lived experience is gone. “Everybody was getting their news from these basic television channels and also from reading the daily newspapers,” Preston said. “Nowadays you’ve got news and information from every conceivable source. The result of that has been a fragment of the culture where everyone is getting their news from these different sources.”

Readers of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, old enough to remember 1976, described sadness, anger, embarrassment, and fear in 2026. Several called the semiquincentennial mood funereal and said the flag now feels politically loaded. The Los Angeles Times treated America 250 as a dud compared with the years-long bicentennial blowout.

NPR framed official America 250 events in Washington as President Donald J. Trump’s pageantry, presenting left-wing counter-programming as a stand for “equality and democracy.” That is not real commemoration. That is a refusal to celebrate America on her birthday.

Mass immigration after 1965 changed America’s cultural baseline. Generational turnover changed her public memory. Downward economic mobility diminished her people’s appetite for capitalism. Parties that once had a wide array of beliefs became rigid packages. It has been argued that Americans no longer have a coherent left and right, only coalitions of tribes glued together by issues that do not inherently connect.

Negative partisanship now does more work than shared identity. Politics became a substitute church. “Increasingly you have a lot of people for whom their political identity defines every aspect of their life,” Preston said. “It’s almost like it’s their religion.”

Traditional patriotism survives where it always survives when a culture thins: rural places, older people, Republicans. In many small towns, America 250 looked like 1976. The flag was a flag, not a dare. Elsewhere, the same flag was treated as rightist aggression. Ask what it means to be an American, and some will recite Lee Greenwood. Others will call the country racist. A large share will shrug toward pizza and the NFL.

“I suspect that the majority of people in the United States are probably more indifferent to these things than the national mood might indicate,” Preston said. Indifference is not peace. It is a vacuum. Vacuums typically get filled by people with radical ideas.

The probable future is not a second 1976. It is not a clean national breakup either. Secession and its conflict would wreck the gross domestic product (GDP), impoverishing millions. Americans hate inconvenience. What potentially comes instead is colder. The United States keeps its name, the presidency, Congress, the courts, the armed forces, and the flag. Functionally, however, America drifts toward several countries under one roof.

Keith Preston expects regional compacts of states and cities and more use of the 10th Amendment, which limits federal power in favor of state authority. He sees federal agencies being pushed toward an advisory role. In this arrangement, red regions would still honor 1776. Blue regions would treat 1776 as a blight to overcome. The GDP would hold America’s shell together because the alternative is poverty.

That may be what the muted semiquincentennial ushers in. Fifty years ago, a wounded country still chose her longstanding epic story. Now, many Americans choose the tribe, fashionable grievances, or the couch. A republic can survive debt, scandal, and ugly years. It cannot survive contempt for its own beginning.

Increasingly, Americans no longer think they belong to the same country as someone who votes differently from them. Given the civilizational clash that red-versus-blue politics have become, that is understandable. Nonetheless, it is a bright, flashing warning sign of what America’s future holds.

How many Americans even care to look at this?

 

DHS/ICE continues to do its assigned duties and responsibilities, in spite of opposition interruptions.

 

ICE crackdown in Indiana: 426 arrested without incident in five days

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers continue to expand operations through partnerships with state and local agencies nationwide without incident.

By Bethany Blankley | The Center Square contributor justthenews.com 9-18-26

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers continue to expand operations through partnerships with state and local agencies nationwide without incident.

In a recent five-day enforcement operation in Indiana, “Operation Safe Community-Indiana,” 426 illegal foreign nationals were arrested, including those with extensive criminal histories.

Their combined criminal histories include sex crimes, assault and battery, domestic assault, drug trafficking, assault with a dangerous weapon and other weapons crimes, fraud, identity theft, burglary, property damage, driving while intoxicated, among other charges and convictions.

“Operation Safe Community-Indiana reflects ICE’s continued commitment to protecting Hoosier communities by working alongside our state and local law enforcement partners to arrest and remove criminal alien offenders who pose threats to public safety,” ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations acting Assistant Director Patricia Hyde said. “This operation underscores the fact that when law enforcement agencies cooperate, the American people are safer. We thank our state and local partners for their support and continued commitment to protecting communities across Indiana and the nation.”

While much of the operation was focused on arresting illegal foreign national offenders in the Indianapolis metropolitan area, ICE officers also conducted targeted immigration enforcement actions statewide.

“ICE officers worked relentlessly to locate, arrest and remove more than 400 illegal aliens from the streets of our Indiana communities during this brief but intense operation,” ICE Chicago Deputy Field Office Director Raymond Hernandez said in a statement. Indiana falls under ICE Chicago’s operational jurisdiction.

“Operations like this make for safer American neighborhoods. Every alien arrested during this operation was in violation of U.S. immigration law, and Indiana is safer today as a result of the hard work of our ICE officers,” he said.

ICE officers also arrested members of transnational criminal street gangs as well as those designated as foreign terrorist organizations, including MS-13 and Tren de Aragua, ICE said.

Examples of those arrested include Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, Mexican, Haitian and Guatemalan men with extensive criminal histories who were all in the country illegally. Their criminal histories include sexual battery, inflicting corporal injury on a spouse or cohabitant, multiple DWIs, including with bodily injury; aggravated assault with a deadly weapon on a public officer, criminal recklessness with a deadly weapon, multiple drugs and weapons charges; domestic battery, criminal trespass, burglary, public records forgery, identity theft, false status documents, credit card larceny, among others, ICE said.

ICE is continuing operations in Indiana as more law enforcement agencies are joining a 287(g) partnership in a concerted effort to identify and apprehend criminal foreign nationals who pose public safety threats and to find missing children.

Congress created the 287(g) program through the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1996, which authorizes ICE to delegate to state and local law enforcement officers the authority to perform specified immigration functions only under ICE’s direction and supervision.

Under previous administrations, only one 287(g) partnership was used, a Jail Enforcement Model (JEM). The Trump administration is advocating for law enforcement to participate in three: the JEM, a Task Force Model (TFM) and Warrant Service Officer (WSO) model, The Center Square reported.

So far, 45 287(g) applications have been filed in Indiana, with nearly half of them pending, according to ICE data as of Sept. 15. The majority are for the TFM.

The TFM authorizes local law enforcement officers under the oversight of ICE to conduct limited immigration enforcement during routine police duties "such as identifying an alien at a DUI checkpoint and sharing information directly with ICE, as well as apprehending, transporting and detaining them, ICE explains.

Multiple agreements have been signed by agencies in the same county in the Hoosier State, with the most signed or pending in Putnam and Dearborn counties, according to the data. In addition to sheriff’s offices and police departments, the Indiana Department of Corrections, Indiana Department of Homeland Security and Indiana State Police Department are participating in 287(g).

Nationwide, as of September 15, ICE has signed 2,510 Memorandums of Agreement for 287(g) partnerships in 39 states and two U.S. territories.

 

'The Constitution of The United States' is not a living document; it created 'A Repubic' - 'If You Can Keep It'!

 

In Praise of Constitutions

We should celebrate September 17 because we developed and still live by a document that assures the rule of law and the possibilities of freedom to Americans.

John M. Grondelski | September 17, 2026 www.americanthinker.com

September 17 is Constitution Day, the 239th anniversary of the 1787 signing. Roughly nine months later, it became “the supreme law of the land,” a status it has enjoyed since. It is the oldest written national constitution still in effect.

We take that fact for granted. The idea of a national, written constitution is something we expect. It has, in fact, become so normative that even countries that generally ignore their constitutions (especially their rights guarantees) still feel an obligation to have one. In the 21st century, that’s taken as normal. In the 18th century, it was not something to be taken for granted.

Britain would, of course, say it had a constitution, and it did, of sorts. It was an uncodified one, based on custom, which means -- in the end -- that it is custom and respect for tradition, not necessarily the binding power of law, that limits what can be done. A written constitution avoids that temptation.

We ought to celebrate September 17, not just because we were “first” and now “oldest.” We should celebrate September 17 because we developed and still live by a document that assures the rule of law and the possibilities of freedom to Americans, even if the United States of 2026 is very different from the one of 1787.

We should also realize our Constitution is under attack. It has long been under attack by the partisans of a “living Constitution” who claim that the fundamental law “is what the judges say it is” (Charles Evan Hughes), and not what its text says. But then you lapse into an unwritten frame of government whose meaning is then determined not by prime ministers and cabinets but unelected judges.

But that’s not the biggest problem of the “living Constitutionalists.” The biggest problem is Constitutional bait-and-switch.

The Constitution is a contract, a contract across generations to be and live in a certain kind of country. The text of the Constitution embodies its terms. But when text becomes suggestion, we cease to have a social contract to which Americans at one time assented. Instead, we have a ceaselessly malleable screen on which the elites generally have been able to project their Rorschach visions of a “just” society onto a country that never voted for them. At that point, as Abraham Lincoln observed, “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of” activist judges.

But the attack on our Constitution has assumed a new and, arguably more dangerous form. We see contemporary political activists, for example, trying to neuter the Electoral College and calling for outright abolition of the Senate. They propose packing the Supreme Court to ensconce “living Constitutionalism,” i.e., produce the outcomes they want and claim the Constitution imposes them.

When the framers signed the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin famously observed that what America had been given was “a republic, if you can keep it.” Every generation has had the challenge of keeping that republic by keeping constitutional faith. That task remains our challenge today.

For if we doubt the gravity of our task, consider that while America’s may have been the world’s first written national Constitution, Poland’s was the second. The Constitution of the Third of May 1791, inspired by the American Constitution, was a last-ditch effort to save Poland from being further carved up by Russia, Prussia, and Austria by undertaking necessary governmental reforms.

The resemblance ends there. Whereas the United States has enjoyed the blessings of its Constitution for 239 years, the Polish Constitution of the Third of May (which should mark its 235th anniversary this year) was quickly abolished by the Russians, Prussians, and Austrians. It was, in fact, the incentive for Poland’s further partition, wiping the country off Europe’s maps from 1795 until 1918.

The Constitution of the Third of May was, for its time, a democratic constitution for a constitutional monarchy. Now let’s engage in a thought experiment -- an idea proposed by some historians -- about what might have been had that Constitution survived.

It’s hard to imagine that a democratic constitution in Poland in the late 18th century would not have had effects on its authoritarian neighbors (which is why they wanted that constitution gone). Would a successfully democratic Poland have accelerated Europe’s springtime of nations? With democratic influence, might Germany have taken other directions than Prussian militarism? Might the power-sharing that Hungarians (and, later, Croats) demanded in the Austro-Hungarian Empire helped democratize that multiethnic entity? Most importantly, what might have been the effect on Tsarist Russia of a successful democratic state on its doorstep? If democratic trends had begun in any of these countries earlier than they did, might there not have been a World War I? A Hitler? A Lenin? A Stalin?

History in the subjunctive is, of course, not history: we know what happened. But it is worthwhile reflecting on what might have been and, in the words of our own Constitution’s Preamble, rededicate ourselves through it to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Happy Constitution Day!

 

Not immigration, but necessarily one of our Nation's catastrophic nightmares!

 

The Marriage Deficit Is an Economic Catastrophe

The decline in marriage and children is a threat to the American future.

Stephen Moore Columnist patriotpost.us 9-15-26

The Beatles told us: “All you need is love.”

They were right, but along with love must come marriage.

But marriage rates have plummeted, especially among young men.

A Pulitzer Prize-worthy story by Sean Salai of The Washington Times crunches all the numbers. To say they are worrisome would be a vast understatement.

-- In 2025, nearly twice as many men ages 18 to 39 were unmarried as were married.

-- There were 30.4 million unmarried men ages 18 to 39 in 2025, up 47% from 20.7 million in 2000.

-- In the same period, married men in this age range dropped by 15%, from 18.1 million to 15.4 million. “Such men are more likely to be lonely, prone to deaths of despair and unhappy,” according to Brad Wilcox, a University of Virginia sociologist.

-- Forty-two percent of working-class men are unmarried, according to educational psychologist Donna R. Turner. In 1980, 73% of working-class men were married.

I could go on and with these depressing statistics. But I believe the decline in marriage and children is a threat to the American future much more dangerous than even the national debt, climate change, cancer or foreign aggression.

Family is the essential organizing unit in America. We’re not to live in Soviet-style communes where the authority figure is “Big Brother.”

Every study shows that the decline in marriage among young men is tied to alcoholism, violent crime, drug abuse, pornography, depression, isolation, less economic success and suicide.

Are women to blame? Certainly. Study shows that as women have become more career oriented, they are having a harder time “marrying up.”

Generation X and millennials have become choosier in finding a mate and more likely to have children alone, if they have them at all. “Women have less structural need for marriage than past generations did,” said Angelica Gianchandani, a New York University finance instructor. “Rising income and education give many women a financial independence marriage once provided, and donor sperm and fertility treatment have decoupled motherhood from a partner altogether.”

Women are much less likely to be religious today than in decades past. So holy matrimony is less of a lifetime priority or moral obligation.

We do know that when women raise children without a father in the home — for whatever reason — their kids, especially their sons, are less successful. It’s a particular problem for Black women to find a suitable mate when so many young Black males are incarcerated.

I’m thrashing for explanations and solutions to this deeply troubling social trend. Obviously, we are not returning to the “Father Knows Best” norms of the 1950s or 1960s.

But recovery starts with admitting we have a problem. I would suggest that President Donald Trump announce a national bipartisan commission on “Rediscovering Love, Marriage and Parenthood.”

One last stat to underscore the urgency of turning around these trends:

The latest Census Bureau data indicate that 47% of households were headed by married couples last year, down from 78.8% in 1949.

That trend MUST be reversed to advance America’s economic prosperity and human happiness.